


Iterations and Explorations

by pagerunner



Series: the echoes of our choices [4]
Category: Borderlands
Genre: M/M, gayperion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-23
Updated: 2015-12-11
Packaged: 2018-05-03 02:49:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 25,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5273693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pagerunner/pseuds/pagerunner
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every time is the first time in its own way. Follows the development--and the complications--of Rhys and Vaughn's relationship, sexual and otherwise, between Reset and Restart and The Spaces We Share.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Silence is a Valid Option

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A note here, retroactively, before things begin: This fic was originally meant to be a five-things sort of story, told in short vignettes. That accounts for the variations-on-a-theme title and the length of chapter 1. But as you'll shortly discover, this sucker ran away with me. The five-plus-one story is actually still very much here, but...it grew.
> 
> Oh, did it grow.
> 
> Welcome to the ride.

The first time is all hands, trembling fingers and anxious closeness, with clothes pulled all awry and eyes not certain where to look.

Rhys had thought he was settled with this whole notion—the sudden escalation of a furtive mutual crush, grown into something more—but somehow it’s another matter again with Vaughn undoing Rhys’ fly and moving in to touch him, breathing so roughly like he is, and _not talking._ This had all started with talking, with confessions and questions and nervous laughter. They’ve moved past the laughter. Now it’s all nerves, and Rhys barely knows what to do with himself.

His body has some ideas, at least, but his brain’s still desperately trying to catch up.

At least he’d had enough sense to stand with his back to the wall, instead of crowding his much shorter friend—boyfriend? Lover? God, what was the word?—into the space. They’re still kind of negotiating that difference of height, and maybe it would have been better to do this elsewhere, but now that it’s happening they’re both a little too overwhelmed to reconsider the logistics. Besides, Rhys’ jeans are hanging off his hips now and his underwear’s about to join, and moving would assuredly mean tripping helplessly, so he’s more than willing to stay put. Stay, and let Vaughn pull him loose from his rumpled clothes, while that lovely lovely wall gives him the support that his knees won’t.

Vaughn finally says something at that point, but it’s too hushed for Rhys to make it out, even standing this close. It sounds a little wondering, so maybe it’s a compliment—his ego privately hopes it’s a compliment—but more likely it’s just a reaction to the moment, with Vaughn’s fingers sliding along Rhys’ length while Rhys twitches and swears despite himself and feels himself get even harder. He’s sweating, and his eyes are stinging.

And it’s his turn to repay the favor. He just wishes he were more coordinated with buttons right about now, because he seriously doesn’t know what to do with his hands and he just wants to get Vaughn’s pants off, wants to stop having to wonder what he’s gotten himself into, wants to _know—_

(Not that he hasn’t seen Vaughn naked, of course, they’ve been roommates for far too long, but the rules then were different and…oh, _everything_ about this is different, and goddammit, anyway, why is his new hand still so ungainly when he needs it _not_ to be?)

Vaughn finally laughs, still nervously, and helps him, almost as haltingly. Then he’s stepping out of his pants entirely, which gives him far more room to move than Rhys has. Yet again, Rhys has to consider that even if they’re both nervous, he really, really doesn’t have the upper hand here. Especially not in view of, well, _Vaughn._ He’s smaller, sure, logically enough, but he’s fuller, too, and there’s just something about seeing someone else’s erection when it’s happening _because of him_ that makes Rhys’ head fall back with the force of his own gasp. 

His head, in fact, hits the wall when he does that, which is so abrupt and sharp that it hurts like hell. Suddenly he’s not so much of a fan of the wall after all. In fact, he’s having rather dangerously intimate ideas about other, softer places. Like that couch a few feet away. Or beds.

But then Vaughn’s _there,_ pressed against him and kissing him and…yeah, they aren’t making it as far as the bed yet. They’re going to finish this right here, one way or another. Maybe just with fingers, although Rhys’ natural hand is shaking and he doesn’t trust the cybernetic one just now. Or maybe—

Vaughn gives him a look, heated and unfamiliar, and there’s a little flicker of a smile before he licks his lips. And then he’s moving. Sliding down.

And—oh. _Oh._

Apparently that’s one more thing Vaughn unexpectedly knows how to do. Knows how to do really, _really_ well.

That, Rhys thinks as he starts trembling all over from the wet heat around him, works just fine, too.

So the first time isn’t all hands after all, not in the end, and Rhys has never been so glad for Vaughn not to be talking in his life.


	2. Going Up

The second time happens after an argument, because Yvette has definitely picked up that there’s something going on between the two of them, and Rhys and Vaughn are feeling divided on what to tell her.

“There’s no point in keeping it secret from her,” Vaughn says, sounding irritated. They’re sitting over a lunch table in the Hub of Heroism, with plenty of people within earshot, and if either of them get any louder, the whole idea of _secrets_ is going to become academic anyway. “It’s not like she’ll _object,_ she’ll just—“

“Never let us hear the end of it?” Rhys says dryly. “Poke fun? Use it as leverage?”

Vaughn flinches at that. They’re all friends, of course, but they’re friends who plot and scheme and exchange favors, who all have plans for getting ahead within Hyperion: mostly as a unit, sometimes separately. When they’re all good at finding weaknesses in other people in order to play them…well. Just because they’re friends doesn’t mean they’ve kept each other entirely off limits.

Hyperion’s a hell of a place sometimes.

They go around the point for a while anyway, while people mill past and Rhys’ coffee gets cold. He has half a mind to flag someone down and order another, but Vaughn gets impatient and nudges Rhys’ leg beneath the table. “Enough already. Aren’t there better things we could be doing?”

“Um,” Rhys says, recognizing that look now. “ _Here?”_  

Vaughn squares his shoulders. “You want to keep secrets, fine, but I want a trade,” he says, drawing from some unexpected well of stubbornness. “I’m not keeping everything cooped up in one tiny little apartment forever.”

“And how do we make that work, if we’re not telling people…?”

“Come on, Rhys,” Vaughn says, and now he’s practically playing footsie with him, which would be weirdly hilarious if it weren’t for the fact that Vaughn runs distinctly warm, and the pressure’s distracting. “You’ve told me about getting away with all sorts of things with your girlfriends. Public places, even. Like with Stacey.”

Oh, and is _that_ ever a jab. Rhys hasn’t properly broken up with her yet. He winces, rubs his arms, and looks up at the distant ceiling, trying not to rise too much to the bait—or, for that matter, to the persistent ankle-height rub of skin against skin. “What, you want me to take you on a tour of my past conquests? Really?”

Vaughn makes a face. “No. But if you could come up with that, for them…you can figure out _something.”_

Rhys eyes Vaughn. And then he thinks about it. Because now it’s practically a dare. 

He looks around the room again, seeing no good opportunities. It’s still too open and too crowded in here. But then he finds himself pondering something else: the elevators. The hall is ringed with them. They’re glass-walled, and they go practically forever overhead.

 _Hmm_.

Vaughn gives him another impatient nudge while he’s plotting, but when Rhys points up, Vaughn looks, too. He slowly gets the idea.

“Good view up there,” Rhys says idly.

Vaughn shifts awkwardly, watching a group of workers board one car and zoom up several floors. “Uh, yeah. In both directions.”

“You were the one who asked,” Rhys says pointedly. Vaughn blushes a little, which just makes Rhys grin. 

 _Upper hand,_ he thinks. _Finally._

It isn’t long before Vaughn nods tightly in agreement. When Rhys gets up and indicates an elevator bank, Vaughn hurries to follow. They head across the hall together to elevator 3.

They can’t board it by themselves, unfortunately. Two other employees follow them in before Rhys can shut the doors, and they hit a button for four floors up. Rhys, impatient, punches a much higher number. Vaughn fidgets next to him while they wait it out. “Come on,” he mutters under his breath, glaring at the two women chatting with each other. “Get off already.”

Rhys bends close enough to whisper in his ear. “We’ll all be getting off soon enough.”

Vaughn swears and kicks him. It’s all Rhys can do not to laugh. And when the women finally, _finally_ reach their floor and the doors close behind them, Rhys powers up the hacking interface in his arm.

“Give me just a minute,” Rhys says. Vaughn watches with curiosity as he disables the security cameras, then the alarms that would normally trip if the elevator came to an unscheduled halt. Finally he makes another command. They ascend seven and a half more floors, then come to a smooth stop. He can feel the emergency brakes kick in for good measure. They’re not going anywhere until he says so.

Rhys grins, satisfied, and lowers his hand. They’re stopped at a secure, walled-off floor; there aren’t any windows here with direct views into the elevator shaft, just giant promotional banners covering the walls. But the two of them can still see the entire Hub below. Rhys turns Vaughn around, pointing through the glass. Vaughn approaches it hesitantly.

“Did I mention,” Vaughn says, “I’m not actually all that great with heights?”

“I’m not either,” Rhys admits with a little, nervous laugh. At least he trusts Helios’ construction work to be sturdy, though. Mostly. “But that’s why _you’re_ standing in front.”

“Uh…I am…?”

Rhys plants Vaughn firmly in place, stands behind him, and lets his hands settle on his hips. “Mmm-hmm.”

This time, Rhys gets to see Vaughn’s reflection as he catches up. First it’s a look of surprise, then it’s a shaky, exhaled breath. The glass fogs with it. “Oh,” Vaughn says.

Rhys grins again, watching the glass getting more and more opaque as he reaches around, actually manages to undo Vaughn’s buttons himself this time, and slides a hand in to work him the rest of the way up.

It’s still a little awkward, with Vaughn clutching the handrail and rising onto his toes, and Rhys bending somewhat, wishing he could stand closer to get more friction. But there’s still something heady about this, about being literally above it all while he jerks his friend off. Vaughn’s moaning with it, and Rhys keeps kissing his temple and whispering nonsense into his ear, mostly because he doesn’t trust himself with full sentences. He’d probably say something a little too honest—like how the bump and slide of their bodies at this angle is making him think of even more intimate contact, and he’s still not even sure what to do with how that’s making him feel.

Instead, he braces his metal hand against the glass, swipes his other palm across the condensation for a little extra moisture— _God,_ Vaughn’s eyes in the reflection are so bright—and turns his head until he’s panting against Vaughn’s skin as his hand returns, sliding over and around him ever faster. It isn’t long before Vaughn comes with a shout and a sudden jerk of his hips, and an unmistakable spatter against the glass.

It’s quiet for a while before Rhys moves again, gently stroking Vaughn one more time and listening to him sigh before letting him go. He hasn’t come yet himself, but he almost does right there—no matter how much he’d wreck his clothes as a result—when he raises his head enough to see the mess they’ve made, streaking across what, from their vantage point, looks like half of Hyperion.

 _God_ , that view is satisfying.

“Well,” Vaughn says haltingly a minute later. He’s shaking in a way Rhys is afraid means he’s upset, but at last Rhys recognizes it as silent laughter. “We’re, uh. Gonna have to call a service bot to clean that up, aren’t we.”

“Hah. Oh, God. We might.”

Rhys buries his face in Vaughn’s hair as he laughs. But then Vaughn turns a little, nudging him with one hip. The angle of that nudge feels pretty deliberate. “You gonna add to the display, then?”

“I…uh…wait.” Rhys pushes himself back upright. “You want me to—?”

Vaughn grins mischievously. “Seems only fair. And I want to watch you do it.”

Rhys stares, shaking his head a little as he laughs. He _never_ would have called it, that Vaughn could be so forward. He’s _never_ this forward. It feels like their orbit’s gone completely off course. But he’s also turned on by it, couldn’t even pretend to be otherwise, so he takes the challenge. He undoes his pants and pulls himself out, flushing both with surprise and a little bit of pride about how avidly Vaughn’s watching him. Then—after pressing his synthetic hand to the glass again for support—he starts pumping, trying to put on a show but afraid he’s not going to have much patience. The motion and the attention both feel so good that he knows this won’t take long at all.

It’s almost unnerving, in fact, how much better this is than those other assignations around the station that Vaughn was needling him about, the things he’d gotten up to when things felt too boring or routine, with partners who never rose to the occasion quite like _this—_

The tension ratchets up at the thought, and his whole body tenses. Vaughn makes a strange little groan at the sight, one that goes straight to Rhys’ dick. And just like that, sharp and sudden, he screws his eyes shut and comes, gasping for air while he rides out the pleasure for pulse after pulse.

When he finally comes to and focuses again—glad that he was supporting himself with the stronger arm, or he’d probably have toppled over—he sees Vaughn take in the sight of him, blushing all over. Then Vaughn turns and traces one finger through the pale, wet streaks they’ve both left on the glass. It’s almost like he’s a little bit awed. A sharp jab of arousal spikes through Rhys again at the idea.

After a moment of study of his own hand, Vaughn looks up with a crooked grin. 

“Yeah,” he says. “Definitely going to have to call a service bot.”

Rhys, still feeling warm and pleasantly hazy, can only manage, “Uh-huh.”

“Or, y’know. Somebody could…”

Rhys just blinks, since Vaughn isn’t exactly saying what he’s getting at. But then Vaughn nods sideways at the glass and conspicuously licks his fingertip clean, making the meaning perfectly clear.

And seriously, Rhys thinks as he stares in amazement, _oh my God._

Mercifully, Vaughn starts laughing before Rhys can even begin to formulate a reply.

“Almost got you there,” he says. With that, he tugs Rhys in closer again. They’re both a mess and half undressed and it’s still a little bit of a shock feeling Vaughn against him like this, but Rhys goes willingly, even if he’s still laughing in disbelief. 

“I cannot _believe_ you just suggested I—“

“Oh, shut up. That look on your face was hilarious.”

“I’m getting you back for that.”

“I sure hope so.”

There’s something to Vaughn’s voice right then that Rhys doesn’t get a finger on, in part because he’s still laughing himself as he leans in for a kiss, and Vaughn returns it too eagerly for either of them to dwell on it. Maybe it was one dare too far—but that kind of audacity deserves _something_ in return.

Considering how the day’s been going so far, he has the feeling the two of them can figure something out.


	3. Approach and Retreat

The third time by rights should be lucky, but that, somehow, is where things begin to slip.

Until this point they’ve been, by most sensible definitions, having sex, but there are still certain milestones they’ve…skirted past, for one reason or another. Impatience or uncertainty have kept them to the simpler sorts of making out, to getting each other off with hands or mouths or basic friction, to seldom even getting fully unclothed, at least all at the same time. The closest they’ve been to sharing a bed is a night lying together on the apartment’s worn couch, really too short for Rhys’ long legs, which led to a lot of hopeless repositioning attempts, laughter, and tangling together both by design and utter accident. Then they stayed there face-to-face, so intimately pressed together that it was hard to breathe, hard to speak, hard to do anything but stare at each other, trembling with the need to do _something_ but suddenly too afraid to move. Like the whole moment had become too fragile, and could easily shatter.

Rhys woke the next day with half his limbs asleep and a cramp that didn’t fade for hours, which is what he’s still blaming for not repeating the experience. But he can still feel that tight, quivery ache in his chest every time he thinks about it.

 _Something_ has to be done. Something about that feeling. Something, too, about the—well, the actual sex.

It’s just that that’s the part Rhys has _no idea_ how to handle.

Sure, he has the general idea of the mechanics, because curiosity and friends who over-shared took care of that years ago. But the personal negotiations almost worry him more. How do you decide who does what, exactly? If you’re supposed to instinctively _know_ whether you’ll be taking charge or, well, taking it (as Rhys thinks one afternoon, in a nervously sardonic sort of way), he suspects he missed the memo. If he and Vaughn are out of sync on what they want, how do they fix that?

 _It’s easier with girls,_ Rhys thinks a little bit glumly (and perhaps inaccurately, but he's brooding), which is an odd emotion to be having when poking through a list of videos that alternately make him jump and squirm and feel entirely too constricted by his clothes. _I mean, there’s all sorts of ways to go about sex with them, too, but it’s hard to get the basics wrong._

He’s pretty sure he missed out on the basics of this entirely. And these vids—he gets one good look at one of the guys involved, goes wide-eyed, and mashes the _close_ button so fast it’s ridiculous—aren’t exactly starting at step one, either. He mutters a few choice curse words at the ECHONet search engine, and shuts down the display.

At least he has a good idea of what to expect from Vaughn physically ( _and it’s not a foot-long dick, thank_ God) but the rest of it? Still no clue.

Eventually he’s going to have to ask.

That happens awkwardly, despite his best intentions. It’s after a day of mundane nonsense and work frustrations that get resolved, as they’re tending to these days, with making out. It starts in the kitchen while they’re arguing over who’s got claim on the leftovers, and that quickly turns into Rhys swiping a spring roll off Vaughn’s plate, leering at him all the way. And _that_ in turn begins a semi-serious tussle that’s really more of an excuse to get all over each other. Rhys has no idea who wins, but it ends with them being pretty much sprawled all over each other on the couch, so really, he’s pretty sure they both do.

But oh, God, here they are again. _This close_ , again. They’re positioned so that Rhys is mostly behind Vaughn, spooning him, really, and there’s no way not to rub against him any time either of them moves. 

 _Fuck,_ Rhys thinks when he feels himself start to get hard against Vaughn’s backside. And then: _Well. That’s kind of…the idea._

He still has to resist the urge to press his face into Vaughn’s hair out of sheer embarrassment. Instead, he takes a hasty breath and says, “You know, I’ve been thinking, We, uh, still haven’t…”

Vaughn tenses slightly. Rhys gives him what he hopes is a reassuring squeeze. Of course, it also rocks his hips harder against Vaughn, which does complete the sentence in a way, albeit by accident. Vaughn’s breath hitches.

“Yeah, I’ve…I’ve been thinking about that, too.”

“You have?”

Vaughn nods tightly. Rhys wishes suddenly he could see his face. It might help. He has no idea how to read Vaughn right now, except to go by his body language, and that’s gone from being relaxed to being distinctly anxious. 

“Is it a bad idea?” Rhys says hurriedly, and Vaughn looks over his shoulder.

“No.” His glasses are askew, Rhys notices; he reaches up to help, and Vaughn blushes at the flicker of fingertips against his cheek. “Not a bad idea. I just—wasn’t sure if I should push it. I know you haven’t done this—“

“But you have, right?”

Vaughn goes silent at Rhys’ guess. Eventually he says, “Yeah.”

“Oh,” Rhys says. Just _oh_ , for a second. “Okay.”

It’s not like he’s surprised, of course, after what Vaughn had hinted at before. It’s just that it’s _confirmed,_ which he wishes were a relief. It’s more like, yep: Rhys is still the newbie. He’s not used to that feeling. It’s nerve-wracking trying to make the best of it, not to mention trying to keep any measure of control. “So…can I ask which way you…um…like it, I guess?”

“You mean a top or bottom sort of thing?”

Rhys nods. It's a little weird, Rhys thinks, having this conversation—something he’s suspecting is about to get _very_ blunt—while practically cuddling, in an intimate little space that feels like it ought to be more innocent than this, somehow. Or at least it would be without the persistent hard-ons. Vaughn’s just turned himself around, in what wasn’t the most elegant of maneuvers, but which has resulted in them fully facing each other. The fact that he’s also responding to the proximity is pretty damn clear.

“It’s not like that has to get set in stone, you know,” Vaughn says, making a funny little shrug. “Some guys like it better one way or another, some switch it up…”

“Yeah,” Rhys says, more hoarsely than he’d hoped, “but _somebody’s_ gotta go first.”

Vaughn almost smiles. “So which way are you more nervous about? ‘Cause you are. Nervous.” He rubs Rhys’ shoulder and tries again when Rhys doesn’t answer. “Is it about _being_ penetrated, I mean, or…?”

“Here come the blunt questions,” Rhys whispers, his voice breaking on a laugh. “Yeah, okay. Um. That. Probably?”

“Then did you want to fuck me?”

He asks it so softly it almost takes the edge off the word, which Rhys didn’t think was possible. But still, he’s said it, and God, this is almost _too much_ for being nose to nose and staring at each other like this. Seriously, there’s no room to breathe. There’s only enough space for Rhys to clutch at Vaughn’s arm and to whisper, “Yes.”

Vaughn breathes out slowly, then meets Rhys’ eyes again, taking that in. It’s his turn to say, “Oh. Okay.”

The way Vaughn’s whole body gives an intimate little shudder, Rhys has the feeling it’s a good _okay._ He makes a low, slow sound in response as he feels a rush of heat spread through him, too.

But before he can say anything else, Vaughn gets up and helps him off the couch.

They don’t exactly walk into Vaughn’s bedroom together. It’s more that they collide mid-stride, too eager all at once to touch, and they end up pressed against the doorjamb for several heady moments before remembering to step onward and tumble onto the mattress.

And Rhys begins to think as they start undressing each other that he might actually have this.

Which is to say— _this_ part, where they’re touching and tugging each other into kisses and Vaughn’s finally letting Rhys take his shirt off—this he can do. This is easy. Rhys feels entirely confident in how good he is at kissing, especially with the way he can get Vaughn to groan into his mouth like that, with just a little nip and caress and a slide of his tongue, and running his fingers down Vaughn’s throat like that until his hand can spread out across his shoulder. Wow, Rhys thinks: bare skin. New places. They’ve gone about this nudity business entirely backwards, really, and it almost makes him laugh.

When he looks down, though, the urge fades. Vaughn’s looking good these days, slimmer than he used to be, and Rhys can’t stop watching the way his chest is rising and falling with his rapid breathing, the way his cock’s curving up toward his stomach. Rhys is still cautious, though, about reaching down to touch. Maybe he doesn’t want to do that too quickly this time, if…

“Come on, Rhys,” Vaughn says. “Get your damn pants off.”

 _That_ makes him laugh, even if the sound’s a little strained. Rhys backs up and takes care of that, while Vaughn does the same, and then they’re both naked (well, except for Rhys’ socks) and on the bed together and…oh, God. He takes a deep breath. Vaughn, for his part, takes a good, long look, tracing over the tattoos on Rhys’ chest, then tears himself away to pull off his glasses and exchange them for something on the bedside table. “Condoms,” he mutters. Rhys goes from feeling the rush of Vaughn’s attention to feeling a little embarrassed. He’d bought the same supplies, but they’re on the other side of the apartment. So much for planning.

Thanks to Vaughn, though, he’s got a small yellow tube pressed into his hand, while Vaughn himself starts busying himself with wrappers, and—

Again, all he can think all of a sudden is, _Oh, God._

 _This is actually happening._

When he finally hears words again, they’re “Can I put this on you?”

Rhys breaks from his reverie to see Vaughn with a condom and an expression of anticipation. He takes a couple deep breaths to steady himself. _It’s okay, you’ve done_ this _much before,_ he tells himself, as he tries to settle back into a kneel. _This part isn’t new…_

Except it is, of course. Everything is. He’s staring through the dim room at Vaughn, who’s got his tongue between his teeth—a familiar look of concentration under _any_ other circumstance—and he also can’t help but see those old books and gadgets on the shelf over Vaughn’s shoulder, not to mention one of Rhys’ shirts draped over a nearby chair ( _seriously, dude, you borrowed that?)_. It’s impossible, here of all places, not to feel a little shocked that it’s Vaughn’s fingers rolling latex over his skin. No matter how much they’ve done over the last few weeks, this is still something else again.

Rhys’ confidence cracks at that, because goddammit, this isn’t some random date. This is Vaughn. He can’t mess this up.

Suddenly he’s terrified again that he’s going to.

 _No wonder Vaughn figured all this out with other people,_ Rhys thinks, biting his lip. It doesn’t help, because Vaughn looks up through startlingly long lashes as if Rhys has just done something deliberately sexy. 

He lets go in a hurry and breathlessly asks, “Can you walk me through this?”

Vaughn smiles, nods, and reaches up to flip the cap on the lube still in Rhys’ cybernetic hand. Rhys feels lucky, honestly, that he isn’t clutching it hard enough to accidentally squeeze the stuff everywhere. It really would have figured.

Then Vaughn glances at the bed, looking as if he’s deliberating. “It might be easier if I’m, um, facing down, or…”

“No. I want to see you.”

Something in Rhys’ voice gives Vaughn pause. Rhys shuts his eyes, bends his head, and then breathes in quickly, tilting his chin back. “Come on, come on…”

Vaughn nods shallowly, then grabs a pillow, lies back, and settles it under his hips. Rhys keeps trying to make note of the details, wanting to make sure he remembers how to do this right, but it’s all starting to blur. He’s been hard too long, for one thing, and his fingers are trembling when he tries to coat them with the gel. He’s sort of done this to himself, but no, this isn’t the same thing, not at all. Not the way his heart’s racing as he settles between Vaughn’s bent knees, metal hand braced on one inner thigh, the other held before him.

He stalls there for a second, suddenly angry that he can’t even feel the heat of Vaughn’s skin this way. It’s another way he’s slightly held apart from what he wants to be doing, and it’s his own fault. The hand, his nervousness…he chose one, and he can’t control the other.

God, why can’t he control the other? Why does it keep getting _worse_?

Well, ultimately, he knows why. He cares about the outcome here, perhaps a little too much. He cares about Vaughn. He wants this to _work._ And if he messes it up… 

“Rhys,” Vaughn says. “Hey, take it easy. Here. Together, okay?”

He takes Rhys’ organic hand in his, slipping their fingers together. It’s half a gesture of comfort, half a practicality; the gel is thoroughly spread between their hands now. Rhys watches his face, not looking away, reminding himself to breathe as Vaughn brings their joined hands down. Vaughn diverts them slightly on the way for one long stroke along his own cock—Rhys almost laughs at the little, mischievous grin Vaughn makes—and then he keeps going, nudging Rhys’ fingertips against his hole. Rhys’ pulse jumps.

“It’s okay,” Vaughn says, trying to talk him through it. He sounds nervous, too, honestly; it’s just not quite enough to level the ground. “You won’t hurt me if we go gradual, stretch a little first, just…easy, okay? Breathe.”

Rhys nods, but he doesn’t say anything. He wants to wipe the sweat off his forehead, but it’s a completely ineffectual effort with the metal arm. And of all the times to be distracted, suddenly he can’t stop noticing the faint blue light in the corner of his vision. It’s Vaughn’s desk lamp, the one with the blue shade, the one Rhys ordered special for a birthday one time because it didn’t fit the color scheme of anything Hyperion made—

His fingers press in, just a little, and he feels the heat there, the resistance of muscle, Vaughn’s fingers beside his. He’s almost there. But when he tries to look up, to focus on Vaughn’s eyes and watch how he reacts, he can’t focus. Damn it, he wants to do this, he just…just…

“Rhys?” Vaughn says, suddenly concerned. In this position, he looks so vulnerable. And that’s what cracks it, tipping his emotions from simple anxiety into something worse, something physically dizzying.

He’s _failing_ him.

_Fuck._

Rhys pulls back all in one sudden lurch, prying his fingers from Vaughn’s, and he twists aside before Vaughn can pull him back. He can’t look at him right now. He can’t look at anything. He’s just reacting like he’s been shocked. Years and years since he’s panicked like this, fuck _everything,_ why _now—_

“God, I can’t do this,” he breathes, falling to his back on the bed. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I thought I could do this, I’m sorry…”

He presses the heels of his hands to his eyes, trying uselessly to keep his wet fingers out of his hair. Then he gives up, clutching his head tight. The metal hand bruises. The other’s fingernails cut crescents into his skin.

There’s a small sound of distress, and Vaughn leans over him to pull his hands back, holding tight. “Rhys. _Rhys._ Rhys, man, talk to me.”

He doesn’t open his eyes, not right away. He’s still dizzy, still too busy concentrating on breathing. Worse, he feels so _guilty._ Of all the horrible reactions, he had to have this one?

It’s quiet for a while until he swears under his breath, wanting fervently to disappear. When Vaughn squeezes his hands—even the robotic one picks _that_ up, with a little force-feedback pulse—Rhys looks up at him.

“I _wanted_ to,” he says, because it’s true. “I’m sorry.“

Vaughn’s thumb rubs over his. Suddenly the only thing he can remember is the night before his cybernetic surgery, when Vaughn had been trying to calm him down. He’d touched him the same way then. Rhys swallows, wondering how, in the midst of all this, the contact still feels so good. His erection’s flagged, though, actual arousal somewhere beyond him at this point.

“Are you okay?” Vaughn says uneasily. 

“Um. I will be. I’m sorry, it’s just…”

“Haven’t seen you do that in ages.”

“I know.”

Vaughn fidgets. “Did I…did I push you?”

Rhys takes a deep breath and shakes his aching head. He tries to concentrate on that hand in his, even if the associated memory suddenly stings. “No. Not you. I’m just…” He laughs roughly. “Feeling too much again. Freaking out. Breaking things.”

“You’re not breaking things. Except maybe for your _head._ What did you think you were doing?”

There’s no answer for that, of course. Eventually Vaughn tugs his hands free. The loss almost hurts. After grabbing at a corner of the sheet, Vaughn swipes a trace of blood off Rhys’ forehead, grimacing. Then he sits back with a long, long sigh. He looks tired, and frustrated, and like he can’t decide whether to be angry or sad. And he’s not talking now as he tries to clean things up—wiping Rhys’ fingers dry, pulling off the condom and throwing that away, straightening things out as best he can. Finally he moves back to the other side of the bed. It’s a small bed. He still looks like he’s miles away.

“It’s my fault,” he says slowly. “I knew better. This whole time, I knew better.“

Despite the lingering shakiness, Rhys tries to sit up. Vaughn’s tone is making him nervous in a whole new way. “Wait.“

“No. We shouldn’t have gone this far. Dude, you’re straight, and I’m stupid.” Vaughn’s laugh is bitter, and he keeps talking right over Rhys’ sound of protest. “I mean, you gave it your all, I know, and you weren’t faking, I really have to believe you weren’t faking, maybe you really _did_ want this”—his voice, just for a second, breaks—“but I guess you have a limit, and this is it. And I’m _stupid.”_

Rhys’ heart sinks. For a second, he’s almost afraid Vaughn’s right. But—goddammit, _no._ What he’s been feeling, that’s—

“ _Vaughn._ No. I just wanted so much not to screw up that I _did_ screw up. I psyched myself out, that’s all.”

“And I wanted it so much that I screwed up,” Vaughn says heavily. “Not sure it matters which one.”

For a second, Rhys doesn’t know _what_ to say. Then he wants to yell—at himself or Vaughn, or the whole stupid galaxy, he doesn’t know. He’s not sure if that matters, either. “All right,” he says roughly, wanting to salvage this somehow, to prove himself, and to push down that rattled, awful feeling still quivering through him. “Maybe we both fucked up. Doesn’t mean we can’t try again.” Vaughn looks disbelieving. “Not—I mean, _now,_ but later, somewhere else, some other way, something.”

“Rhys, seriously.“

“Dude, I said I want this. I meant it. I just got overwhelmed. You’re my _best friend,_ Vaughn, and I—“

Some other word threatens to hit him from behind, something too big to voice. Rhys rocks a little under the force of it.All he can say in its place, rough-voiced, is, “And I’m not fucking straight.”

“I don’t know,” Vaughn says dryly, picking at the sheets. “You fuck pretty straight, from the looks of it.”

Rhys sits silent for a second. Then his eyes narrow. “Not funny.”

“It’s _kinda_ funny.”

Rhys snorts, then takes a few more deep breaths. Eventually, when it’s clear Vaughn isn’t going to kick him out or anything, he scoots gradually across the bed. When he’s close enough to touch, he simply folds down until his forehead rests on Vaughn’s shoulder. He feels Vaughn twitch, hears a pained sound that might be Vaughn’s, might be his own. His abused skin still hurts. Again with the bad planning.

He adjusts a little, until his head’s upright again and he’s nestled close enough to murmur into Vaughn’s ear. “You’re right about one thing.”

“Hmm?”

“I was _never_ faking.”

Vaughn lets out another shaky sigh. At least he doesn’t protest or pull away when Rhys reaches around to give him a hug. When Rhys asks quietly, “Can I stay, at least? To sleep?” he finally nods. Rhys tries to stifle the resulting feeling in his chest, the one that’s like hope and a sob threatening to break free all at once.

 _I can’t ruin this,_ he keeps thinking. _Please, let this be okay._

But he doesn’t say it aloud. He just turns, does his best to negotiate with the sheets, and then stretches out beneath them, silently gesturing to Vaughn to join him. It takes a minute, but Vaughn concedes. They’re back to front again, not quite touching, but Rhys presses just a little closer, and finally curls an arm around his waist. He wants that feeling back from the last time they were this entangled: that warm, bright, fragile one. He wants to hold Vaughn until he gets there.

He wants to start over.

It’s on that heart-wrenching thought that he eventually falls asleep.

And however many hours pass that way, once Helios’ day/night cycles come around again, he wakes up with Vaughn still foremost in his mind.

Unfortunately, his arms are empty, because he’s woken up alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Personal confession time: I've had, for my own reasons, panic attacks at inopportune moments. That shit ain't fun, kids.
> 
> Don't worry, though: there will be a follow-up, and they will get much further along. And then there will be whole OTHER reasons to worry. ;) Welcome to the roller coaster!


	4. Confessions, Favors, and Debts

The first thing Yvette says to him when they meet up three days later is, “Okay, Rhys, what the hell did you do _this_ time?”

He winces, having seen that coming, really, and glares at his empty shot glass. He’d called Yvette reluctantly when he wasn’t sure what else to do, and now they’re sitting at a bar way over on the other side of the station from their usual hangouts, filled with Hyperion employees who aren’t in Rhys’ circles at all. That had been the point. He doesn’t want to be overheard, especially not after the increasingly angry pings he’s been getting from Stacey…and the lack of pings from, well, anyone else.

Besides, this place has the best moonshots on Helios. Not the weapon, but the booze you slam back until you’re the one smashed to bits.

They’re well fucking named, honestly.

“Put that _down,_ ” Yvette says, prying the glass out of his robotic hand when he doesn’t immediately respond. It makes a horrible noise. “Jeez, Rhys. I know something’s been going on lately, you and Vaughn have both been acting so weird, but…”

She stops mid-sentence and stares at him. Then she very nearly drops his shot glass onto the bar.

“Holy shit, you didn’t,” she breathes.

“I didn’t, quite,” Rhys says, with a wry nod of agreement. “That’s kind of the problem.”

She sets the glass down with an uneven _knock._ “Okay, okay, wait. Back that train up. And no, you are _not_ ordering another.” She waves off the bartender who’d been approaching them. Rhys lowers his hand and pouts at her. It doesn’t work. “Rhys, talk to me.”

He groans and rubs his eyes. “Um. Okay. Where to start…”

“The beginning, maybe?”

He makes a pained expression. _The beginning_ is a long way back. Maybe it’s the first time he and Vaughn met, or that first impulsive hug way back when, or the first time Rhys caught himself looking across the dorm in the dark and wondering…

He _still_ hasn’t told Vaughn about that one. Maybe he won’t get the chance now.

Rhys shakes his head, though, and fumbles onward. “Vaughn and I sort of—well…it’s been going on for a while. Since after my implants. He was helping me out after a glitch…which is _fixed,_ stop looking at me like that…and he kind of accidentally kissed me.”

Yvette’s expression tilts from amazed to skeptical. “‘Accidentally’? What did he do, fall on your face?”

“Nearly,” Rhys mutters. “Anyway. He meant it, is the thing. And the next day after we talked about it, I kissed him back.”

“And you meant it, too, didn’t you,” Yvette says slowly. Rhys gives one dejected nod. “Jesus. I owe Kenzie ten bucks.”

It takes a second for that to compute. “Wait, what? You were making office bets about me?”

“Doesn’t matter.” Yvette fixes a stern look on him. “Let’s be perfectly clear—you’ve been having a thing with Vaughn? For weeks now?”

He looks mournfully at his empty hands. “Pretty intensely.”

“Shit. I can’t believe I didn’t—” She breaks off. Possibly because she had to have guessed they’d broken things off, too. “And you fucked it up, didn’t you.”

“Hey, how come you’re assuming it’s all on me?”

She gives him a look. “Come on, Rhys. This is Vaughn we’re talking about. He is way too squirrelly to get in over his head about anything without serious encouragement.”

“Uh, you’d be surprised.”

“ _Rhys,_ ” she says, and this time it’s an outright hiss. “You idiot. You’re the only one he gets brave for. And if you’re what he wants and you act like you want him back, he’s going to push himself like all hell to get it, even if you’re being too self-absorbed to see that. So _what did you do?_ ”

Rhys, suddenly regretting the moonshots, suddenly regretting almost everything, pushes past the queasiness and tells Yvette, “We were about to have sex. And I freaked out and backed off.”

“Oh, Rhys.”

“I wanted to,” he says, sounding less defensive than he does lost, even to his own ears. “I don’t think he understands how much I wanted h…how much I wanted to. But I was pushing myself, too, and I—I didn’t want to mess things up…but I did.”

Yvette says wearily, “That’s bad enough, but I can tell from the message you left me that there’s an ‘and’ here.”

“You could say that.” He takes a breath. “I might’ve kinda headed off the next day because I didn’t know what to do, and being in the apartment was awkward as hell after he left…”

“He walked out? Ouch.”

He puts his head in his hands. “And I ended up at Stacey’s.”

Yvette stares at him. Then with great feeling, she says, “Fucking _hell,_ Rhys.”

He doesn’t say anything for a minute. When he finally looks up, what he sees, to his surprise, is Yvette knocking back her own moonshot. He raises his eyebrows.

“Only fair,” she tells him, after a brief grimace and an involuntary shake of her head. “It’s on your tab, just so you know.”

“I expected nothing less.”

“And I expected more.” Her voice is acid. “Really, Rhys, you’ve been friends with him _forever,_ and you couldn’t handle it better than this—?”

“I _know_!” It erupts from him with more anger than he’s expecting, and it knocks Yvette back on her stool. “Fuck, Yvette, you don’t think I don’t _know_? You don’t think I’m blaming myself? I didn’t want to hurt him; I wanted that less than _anything_.”

From the way her expression falls, Yvette can obviously hear every bit of the pain in his voice. There’s something oddly cautious now in her own. “This is about more than just the sex, isn’t it?”

It’s suddenly hard to talk. “Always was.”

Rhys turns away, leaving her to shake her head and say quietly, “God, you’re really in deep, aren’t you?”

His chest hurts. It’s like that aching feeling he’s had about Vaughn for a while now is still there, lingering, but everything’s been so hollowed out that the remainder just stings. All he says in answer is, “Yeah.”

For a while, Yvette just watches him. Then she breathes in and blows out a long, deep sigh. “Fine. What can I do?”

“You’re…willing to help?”

“Maybe,” she says. “Depending on you.”

“Um. Well.” Rhys looks briefly but longingly toward the nearby shelves of liquor. “For one thing, if you could help stop Stacey from totally killing me…” Yvette groans. Rhys says defensively, “I wasn’t a jerk, it wasn’t _bad,_ it just wasn’t the same, and she could tell. So I admitted it wasn’t working anymore. And some of why. And she’s pissed. Also, she works in weapons R &D, have I mentioned that part?”

“You sure do know how to pick ‘em.” Yvette makes a face. “So long as you were honest with her…”

“I swear.”

“Okay. And what about Vaughn?”

“I don’t know.” He rubs his temples. The left one especially is starting to ache. “I want to make it up to him. I’m just not sure how to do that yet, or where…can’t be at home, it’s just too weird…”

“Just to be clear, by ‘making it up to him,’ do you mean doing that with your words, or your dick?”

Rhys is suddenly glad he doesn’t have another drink in hand after all. He’d have done a spit-take for the ages. And as he turns to stare at her in astonishment, Yvette actually has the gall to smirk at him.

“Both, then,” she says. “You better actually go through with it this time, jackass.”

“Um. I…was expecting you to lecture me about how I never get to touch him again, honestly.”

“Oh, I’m still tempted. But just so you know, I talked to him first.”

Rhys blinks, confused. “Wait, you did?”

“Uh-huh. Granted, he said a lot less. And he wasn’t naming names. He never does, he’s too damn shy. But your stories line up. Good thing for you.” Her expression is subtly threatening. Rhys has some notion of how much trouble he’d be in otherwise. “He wants to fix it somehow, too. And I can’t stand being around either of you when you’re acting this much like kicked puppies, so I’m helping you out of pure self-preservation, don’t kid yourself otherwise.”

“And you get to put this in your little mental ledger as _both_ of us owing you, don’t you.”

“Aww. It’s cute when you’re smart enough not to make that sound like a question.”

Rhys snorts. Yvette sits back and says, “I’ll figure out something. And don’t get impatient; I’ll call _you._ You can keep on couch-surfing or whatever the hell it is you’re doing, won’t kill you for a couple more nights.”

“Ugh. It might. Those things are way too short.”

“Poor you,” Yvette says with a distinct lack of sympathy. Then she has the nerve to turn a hopeful look at him anyway. “And how about you order me another drink before I go?”

“Right,” he says sarcastically. “Collecting on the debt already. What’s that cocktail you said you hate, the Screaming Skag or whatever it is?”

“Don’t push it,” she says, swatting him on the shoulder. She sounds amused, though. And then she gets up to leave, gathering her things. Rhys only stops her at the last with a hand to her arm.

“Hey, Yvette?” he says. She looks at him curiously, and he swallows hard before he says it. “Thanks. I mean it.”

She gives him a little flicker of a smile. “Whatever. Just get yourself out of here soon, okay? I don’t want to have to come all the way back just to scrape you off the floor.”

“Cross my heart,” he says, tracing out the X with one metal finger. She gives him half a snort, half a laugh, and with a small wave goodbye, heads out. Rhys is left behind to ponder the bar again—and while he’s at it, an awful lot of his recent choices.

 _You can still do this,_ he tells himself. _Yvette’s on it. And you…you can figure out the rest._

He sure hopes he’s right. And in the meantime, especially since he’s _really_ not looking forward to sleeping on a sofa again, just one more moonshot can’t really hurt.

He hails the bartender again, and braces himself for another difficult night, hoping he doesn’t have too many more of these left to go.


	5. Reunion pt. 1

The next time Rhys sees Vaughn again, it’s in the last place he would have expected.

Helios is divided into multiple sectors: R&D, manufacturing, testing, office space, residence, recreation, transportation, and support and sanitation for all of the above. Some sectors are so classified that only rumors hint at their true function. Some are simply too exclusive to get visited by the ordinary employees who live and work next door. 

Rhys, who’s holding a transit passcard the likes of which he’s never seen before—he’s just had to swipe it through _three_ separate security checks, for increasingly skeptical guards—has just stepped into the atrium of one of those sectors. And he’s gaping in disbelief, because even Yvette’s hints and instructions to _dress nicely, for God’s sake; I called in a lot of favors to get you guys a nice spot, all right?_ didn’t prepare him for how many strings she’d pulled.

The evidence is hard to miss now.

The Tesni Tower Suites complex is a tower of sorts within the station, which seems absurd, but Helios architecture does tend toward the ridiculous. It’s a hotel, meant to provide accommodations for visiting VIPs. Rhys has only ever seen photos and newsvid footage of it. His most vivid memory punches through as he’s staring at the place: an encounter several years ago between Handsome Jack and a visiting Dahl official, who got exactly as far as a grand reception in the atrium before he was…demoted. Forcibly. And in pieces.

It’s hard to imagine anything that violent happening in a plaza this gilded, but then again, half the point of it probably _is_ to lull guests into a false sense of security. It’s got just enough plushness to cover up the peril.

Which isn’t terribly reassuring, come to think of it. Especially not with that—Rhys stares, and searches for a word— _remarkable_ statue of Jack astride his diamond pony right there in front of him. 

Well. This _is_ Hyperion, after all.

And a small figure is standing beside that statue, head cocked, a skeptical expression on his face. It’s so familiar a frown that Rhys’ breath catches in his throat.

“Huh,” is all Vaughn says. Then he turns, just enough to see Rhys standing there.

For a second, neither of them say anything.

Rhys holds the gaze, at least, not letting himself back off. Vaughn’s expression is a complex, shifting thing: part resignation, part tentative longing, part sadness of a sort that makes Rhys feel so damn _guilty._ Then Vaughn shrugs, looking up again at the rearing statue. A crooked smile lifts up one corner of his mouth.

“Yvette didn’t warn me we’d be getting _this_ view,” Vaughn says. “If she had, I might’ve brought barf bags.”

Rhys lets out a choked laugh. He steps up closer, juggling his bag from hand to hand. “Ah, come on, it’s not that bad. There’s a kind of…majesty about the thing.”

“Oh, yeah. In the take-a-look-at-the-crushed-skulls-beneath-him kind of way.” Vaughn points at the bronze sculpture’s base. Rhys hadn’t noticed the details right away, but Vaughn’s not wrong. “You might not want to stand underneath the hooves.”

“Pfft. It’s not _real,”_ Rhys says. Remembering the stories about Jack’s infamous horse, though, which pretty much defy all rules of nature or logic, he sidles out of the way. Just in case.

It means he almost bumps into Vaughn, and he has to take a second to recover himself, blushing and stammering an apology that doesn’t quite come out full-formed. 

In the resulting silence, they both look around at the sharp-dressed guests milling about the atrium. Government members and attachés, probably. High-ranking corporate officials. Their staff and companions and lackeys. Rhys thinks briefly of taking the opportunity to schmooze—he’ll never get another chance this good—but that’s not why he’s here, and he knows it. The real reason, admittedly, is still making him a little nervous.

Not as nervous as before, he hopes…but still nervous.

“So, uh,” Vaughn says at last. “Exactly how underdressed are you feeling right now? Because I’m kind of wondering if there’s a less conspicuous entrance somewhere.”

Oddly, that makes Rhys feel better, because he can prop _that_ sort of insecurity right back up again. He’s done it for Vaughn enough times before.

“Dude, we’re _guests,_ ” he says. “Doesn’t even matter if we’re underdressed. We’re _expected_. And besides, you’re looking fi…you look fine. Really. Nothing to worry about. It’s…” He clears his throat and abruptly adds, “It’s good to see you, Vaughn.”

Vaughn takes a deep breath. He doesn’t quite reply, just like he hasn’t quite replied to Rhys’ last few messages—just little, quick confirmations here and there, enough to know he’s not gone—but he also doesn’t brush it off. And Rhys knows they may still be doomed to a long and awkward conversation today, maybe not even a resolution, but right then, Vaughn’s wistful smile gives Rhys _just_ enough hope to nudge his shoulder and say, “Come on. Let’s go in.”

Vaughn nods, and they do—whereupon they find out very, very quickly just how much they’ll be owing Yvette, one way or another.

“This place is _ridiculous,”_ Vaughn says, and he’s not kidding. Together they take in the gleaming lobby, the restaurant beside, and the guide to the hotel amenities, which stands on a kiosk in the center of the room. It doesn’t only list predictable things like a spa and pool (Rhys wonders at the implications of “superheated,” then decides to stop wondering), but also plenty of euphemistically named hospitality suites. Those clearly serve up all manner of, er, refreshments. Vaughn points at one of them, wondering. “Isn’t this where one of the Maliwan guys got so high he tried to seduce the ambassador from Demophon—“

“Who shot him in the leg. And shoved him through a window. And Hyperion cut in and got Maliwan’s deal.” Rhys smirks. “Makes you wonder why anyone from any other company ever agrees to attend conferences here.”

“Probably the free drugs,” Vaughn says dryly. “No offense, but _this_ is where Yvette wants us to kiss and make up? Really?”

“Actually, looks like they’ve got other rooms set aside for that sort of thing—“ Vaughn glares at him. Rhys offers a pale smile, withdrawing his finger from the placard for the orgy room. “I was joking.”

Vaughn just rolls his eyes. Again, though, there’s a flash of amusement. 

“Maybe we should see about our actual room first?” Rhys suggests. Vaughn fidgets, all nerves again, but he follows to the check-in counter, sticking close to Rhys the whole way.

It’s probably just old habit. He’s been tailing after Rhys like this for years. It still feels strangely comforting that he’s still willing to come along.

They’re greeted with polite respect and brisk, professional service. Rhys does his best to look suave, but he has no idea if it even registers with the hostess, which is mildly disappointing. Still, he happily takes the offered keycards, then heads with Vaughn toward an elevator—glass, Rhys notes, and has to push down a shiver of arousal at the memory—which takes them up to the sixth floor. Vaughn finds their room first, but he waits for Rhys to open the door. What they see behind it certainly isn’t the fanciest room at Tesni, but it’s miles above their apartment: a junior suite with a sitting room and bar, a suspiciously well-stocked entertainment center, and of course the bedroom beyond. Rhys drops his bag in a corner and walks in to look. The bed is almost obscenely large. So is the curved spread of windows behind it, overlooking—yep—that statue in the atrium.

He takes it all in, and can’t hold back an impressed whistle.

“I don’t even want to know who Yvette had to blow to get us a night at this place,” he says, a little bit awed. Somewhere behind him, Vaughn snorts.

“Uh, that is not how Yvette does things,” Vaughn says. “More likely she reminded a few people that they’d get their supplies cut off and cut off fast if they didn’t get her an in.”

“What kind of supplies are we talking about here?”

Rhys turns in time to see Vaughn pull the stopper out of a decanter, sniff it, and put it back on the counter with a slightly overwhelmed expression. “Better not ask.”

Rhys looks around again, trailing his fingers over the expensive sheets, and sighs. “Gotta tell you, though, bro…I could get used to this.”

“Yeah, well, don’t get too comfortable.” Vaughn wrinkles his nose. “Anything over the cost of the room is still on our tab, and the markup on the drinks and food is at least 60 percent—68, on that bottle you’re holding—“

Rhys puts it back down. “Spoilsport.”

“Spoilsport who knows money and would like not to go broke this month, thanks. Not when…”

He trails off. Rhys is about to ask what he meant when Vaughn sets his shoulders and says instead, “Look, Rhys, this is all kind of…weird, for me, right now.”

 _Here come the awkward conversations_ , Rhys thinks. _Again._ He sighs, nodding. “Um…yeah. I know.” He laughs nervously. “It is kinda weird.”

Vaughn runs a hand back through his hair, in a gesture that looks like he inherited it from Rhys somewhere along the line. “I want things to get back to normal between us,” he says uncomfortably. “I want to keep being friends, I didn’t want this to get complicated, and then it got complicated anyway and…”

“And I probably made it harder without meaning to,” Rhys says, remembering what Yvette had told him. _You’re the only one he gets brave for…_ “I’m sorry.”

“Well. It’s not just you. But thanks.” He cracks a rueful smile. “But now here we are with our other best friend trying to set us up again, and it’s a room with one bed, and, um…yay?”

Rhys gestures at it, feeling oddly embarrassed. In part because he’d still had…well, ideas. “The bed is about the size of your bed _room,”_ he points out. “Pretty sure we can sleep on opposite sides and hardly know the other person’s there. If, um, you want.”

Vaughn leaves as much of a pause before he speaks as Rhys just did mid-sentence. “Still. You snore.”

“So do you, jerk.”

They stare at each other across the room. Then, unable to do much else, Rhys starts laughing. Faintly, he hears Vaughn join in.

Before long, Rhys ends up perched on the edge of an enormous chair, wiping his eyes, and then settling his head in his hands until he calms down, his elbows propped against his knees. “Ah, hell, Vaughn,” he says at last, slowly lifting his head. “I really did miss you, you know.”

“Yeah,” Vaughn says roughly, in a way that does funny things to Rhys’ pulse. And again Vaughn’s right on the verge of saying something more when he turns his head, and suddenly notices something. His eyes go wide. “Wait a sec, is that—“

Rhys looks over his shoulder. Vaughn’s eyeing the entertainment center. Rhys, briefly frustrated, tries to figure out what’s so important, and then he recognizes one of the many, many peripherals bracketing the screen. He understands the distraction _completely_. “No way,” Rhys says. “They’ve got a Hy5 console hooked up to that thing? The _original_?”

Vaughn goes straight for it. “Oh, wow. No way that’s here after all this time unless it was a special request. Tell me they dug up a Skyfighters disc—” There’s a brief sound of rummaging through one of the drawers, then an exclamation. “Oh, _yes._ Way to go, Yvette!”

“I get controller one,” Rhys says, leaping up. 

Vaughn just gives him a look, already holding it, and he punches the power button. The familiar old startup chime is music to Rhys’ ears. “No way, man. I was here first.”

“Oh, whatever. But I’m playing Phaedra.”

“Do you _always_ play the siren in fighting games?”

Vaughn's already dropped onto the couch, getting himself comfortable. Rhys falls in beside him as easily as he ever did. “Yeah, duh,” Rhys replies, navigating the character selection screen practically by muscle memory. “Unless maybe there’s a ninja. And Phaedra’s a siren _and_ a ninja.”

Vaughn snorts. “Yeah, like that’s not overpowered or anything.”

“Why do you think I like this version better than the reissue?” Vaughn just rolls his eyes again. Rhys points. “Besides, look at the characters you always pick. Exaggerated power fantasy much? That guy’s—I mean…”

He pauses, tilts his head, then gives his friend a look. It’s suddenly impossible not to go for the joke.

“That said,” Rhys drawls, “I do have a whole new understanding these days of your appreciation of Captain Beefcake over there.”

For a second, Rhys is pinned under a truly remarkable evil eye. Then Vaughn adjusts his glasses, and his expression turns into a scheming little smirk.

“Oh, I am so about to kick your pretty little siren ass,” he says. 

“Just try me,” Rhys shoots back. And before Vaughn has time to wonder about the look in Rhys’ eyes, Rhys turns back to the screen—and maybe bumps Vaughn’s shoulder just a little bit. Enough that he can’t help but notice the warmth.

If he’s not imagining things, Vaughn’s hands tighten around the controller.

 _Game on,_ Rhys thinks, flashing his own little smirk as he settles in to play. _Game…fucking…on._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A note on naming, for the curious: I wanted a name for the hotel that had something to do with the sun, to stick with the Helios theme. A search brought me almost immediately to Tesni, which means "warmth of the sun"--something appropriately hospitable, yes?--in Welsh. Guess whose names are also both Welsh. I wasn't gonna argue with that one. :)


	6. Reunion pt. 2

In almost no time, they’ve fallen into taking advantage of the hotel amenities after all. The game—which Rhys wins with absolutely no grace, but at least in good humor about the cushions Vaughn’s pitching at him—is quickly followed by the concession that they’re not in any position to try acting civilized at the restaurant, so…room service?

 _Definitely_ room service.

The spread they end up with (delivered by, as Vaughn keeps gleefully repeating, “a _robot butler,_ oh my _god_ ”) is so deliciously indulgent that Rhys knows he’s going to end up spoiled for life.

“God, I missed actual seafood,” Rhys groans at the end of the meal, setting down his chopsticks. The plate’s almost entirely clean. “Haven’t eaten like this since Eden-5.”

Vaughn, who’s done some pretty serious damage himself to a noodle bowl and a sake flight, almost giggles. “You never ate _this_ good on Eden-5.”

“Fine, no, it was more like drooling over restaurants I couldn’t afford…but _still._ ”

He leans back. They’d set up their dinner on the low table by the entertainment center, and they’re both sitting on the floor, propped up against the wayward cushions. It’s more comfortable than it probably should be, aided by a pleasant haze from the alcohol. Rhys, who’s still holding one of Vaughn’s sake cups—Vaughn hadn’t been a huge fan of the plum, but Rhys loves it—finishes the last sip. The ease to all this is such a relief. It’s like the dinners they used to have back in the dorms, back when they didn’t even _have_ a dining table like the one they’re ignoring across the room. Back then, though, the food had been cheap pizzas and cheaper beer.

And back then, he’d never even have thought of what he’s thinking now…namely, encouraging Vaughn to scoot around the table to sit next to him, in the hope he can taste the last of Vaughn’s drink off the other man’s lips.

 _I can do this,_ Rhys thinks, feeling a faint tingle race through him. _We can still do this._

He’s right on the verge of reaching out when Vaughn says something that tips it all sideways.

“Hey, who needs to afford things?” Vaughn laughs, his tone self-deprecating. He’s gesturing again at the table. “It’s not like this meal is almost the entire cost of my security deposit or anything…”

Rhys’ hand lowers. And Vaughn blinks, going wide-eyed, like he’s just realized he’s said something he didn’t mean to say at all.

It’s silent until Vaughn leans into the heel of his hand, elbow propped atop the table.

“Shit,” he mutters.

Rhys opens his mouth, closes it again. He sits up, focusing intently across the table at Vaughn. “Security deposit for _what_?”

Vaughn doesn’t answer right away. He sits back with a sigh. “I haven’t signed for it yet,” he said. “Knew I had to talk to you first. But…I was talking to someone in Residential Services about…well…getting my own apartment.” He swallows hard. “I’m moving out.”

Rhys is at such a loss that when he hears the words “what the _fuck,_ Vaughn?” echo in the room, he almost doesn’t recognize them as his own.

Vaughn winces. For a long time, he doesn’t say anything else. At last his reply comes, though, and it’s a muted, “Sorry.” He rubs his forehead. “But I’ve been thinking about that for…a while, really.”

“How long? And when were you planning on _telling_ me?” Rhys asks, his voice all edges and points. “Before or after dessert?”

Vaughn takes that as the innuendo it is, and goes bright red. He also, however, goes defensive. “Jesus. I _told_ you this whole thing was weird for me.”

“Oh, sure. Yeah.” Rhys smacks the cup down on the glass table, hard enough to make Vaughn jump. “Tell me this, at least. Did you tell Yvette about this plan of yours when you went to her? Because I know she talked to you before she was willing to talk to me. And if the two of you set this whole thing up to make me feel like an _idiot—_ “

“No!” Vaughn looks honestly shocked. “Of course I didn’t! I didn’t tell _anybody._ I was trying to work this out in my own head, and it’s…God, where do you think I have to go with this? It’s all tangled up with you, and…”

Vaughn trails off again. He looks so unhappy Rhys almost feels guilty. Almost. He’s still feeling off-balance and queasy with disappointment, with feeling nearly betrayed.

“Rhys, I can’t do this,” Vaughn says unsteadily. “Whatever we are, we’re not _roommates_ anymore, okay? I can’t just flip a switch and pretend nothing _happened_. I’ve just been thinking that…if we each had our own space, a little room to breathe, we could figure it out better? Meet in the middle somewhere new?”

“I thought that was the point of this,” Rhys says, gesturing to encompass the room. Vaughn hitches one shoulder in a shrug.

“Yeah, and it’s…it’s been great, honestly, I missed this, but…we can’t fix it all in a night, okay? And it’s not like we get to _stay._ ”

That takes the wind out of Rhys all at once, because it's truer than he wishes it were. He looks at his hands. There’s so much he wants to say, but the only thing that breaks free of the mess is, “I wish we could.”

There’s another pause, this one somehow softer. “Me too.”

Rhys sighs, rubs his head, then slowly gets to his feet.

Vaughn doesn’t say anything as Rhys pours himself another drink—this one from the expensive bottle Vaughn had griped about before, because fuck it—and wanders across the floor, outside the pool of light around the table. The bedroom proper is shadowed, its lights all off, and outside it’s as dark as a city night would be. The high atrium space has its own day/night cycle, punctured only by isolated lights in other windows and the false stars sparkling on screens high above. Rhys walks up to the windows, studying it all. The drink’s so deceptively smooth he finishes it in one long gulp, shivering just a little at the sting in its tail.

When he sets down the glass on the bedside table, he sees the box beside it. He powers up his ECHO eye to read its label through the dim light. Once he realizes what it’s for, his lip curls bitterly.

Then he thinks about it.

“You okay, Rhys?” Vaughn asks from across the room. “Look, I’m sorry. I really meant to…do this better.”

Rhys traces a finger over the discreet little label on the so-called intimacy kit. It lists a description, the contents, the price he’ll be charged if he so much as opens it. It’s a lot of money for what’s probably a long shot at this point. He flips the lid back anyway. Condoms, lotions and lubrications, a slim, sleek vibrator, other things nestled into fabric and foam…

He can also see Vaughn’s reflection in the window above. He’s gotten up from the table and is walking closer to the bed, although he’s not out of the light yet. He’s watching Rhys, pensive.

Rhys thinks _really hard_ about it. 

“You’re probably right,” he tells Vaughn without turning around. “I shouldn’t have gotten mad. You’ve got a point—things are different. And besides, it’s your call.”

Vaughn hesitates, like he’s unsure what to do with Rhys agreeing. “It’s not _only_ my call. I mean, I know you’ll have your own finances to work out and all that…I could help. If that, um, helps.”

Rhys smiles wryly. Trust Vaughn to think of the numbers. He bites his lip as he ponders his options, then selects a few items from the box and shuts the lid before walking with them to the foot of the bed.

It’s there that he sets them down, takes a deep breath, and folds his arms across his chest.

“I don’t really care about any of that right now,” he says. “But if we do this your way…then I want a trade.”

Vaughn’s jaw falls a fraction. Maybe it’s from hearing his own words turned back at him. Maybe it’s just that Rhys would have the gall to do it. Either way, Rhys takes what opportunity he has. He lifts his chin and undoes his top shirt button, watching Vaughn all the while.

Clearly, from the way Vaughn’s cheeks redden and his fingers twitch, and—yes, there it is—the shadows shift a little around newly strained fabric, he knows what’s on Rhys’ mind.

“Rhys,” Vaughn says anyway, his voice low. “I don’t know—”

“But I do.” Rhys pops another button. “Because I’ve thought this through, I swear I have…and you must have thought about it, too.”

“You mean…finishing what we started?”

“Sort of.” Rhys’ fingers pause on the third button. “I…” 

Vaughn stares straight at him when he hesitates. “You want it, you should be able to say it.”

Rhys takes a breath, then nods. His hands drop to his sides, and he sets his shoulders back. And he pushes aside the more frantic, if admittedly more honest, words in his head— _have me, take me, please_ —to give Vaughn the clearest answer he can. “I want you to fuck me.”

It goes quiet. For a moment, Vaughn shuts his eyes.

Rhys doesn’t even know _what_ that look on his face means, not really. He also can’t interpret that shaky, sudden whisper. But then Vaughn’s balling his hands into fists and saying, “ _Tell me_ you mean it,” twice in a row, his voice just on the edge of too intense. “Tell me you mean it and you’re not going to freak out or—or run off on me, or…God, I will deck you _right now_ if you’re pulling my chain after all this—“

“Deck me anyway,” Rhys says, suddenly reckless. He doesn’t even care; he’d _take_ the hurt, something physical and real and undeniable, something less confusing than the emotions he still can’t get a handle on. _Aren’t_ you _the one running off? What can I do to make you believe me?_ “I’d fucking deserve it. But I still mean it.”

Rhys takes another rough breath, then moves one step backwards, closer to the bed. He doesn’t break eye contact. He just waits, watching Vaughn waver.

“ _Shit,_ ” Vaughn finally says, his voice cracking. 

For an instant Rhys is afraid he’s pushed too far, because Vaughn looks almost like he’s about to cry. But then he’s moving, crossing the space between them so fast that Rhys almost doesn’t have time to react before Vaughn’s reaching up to grasp Rhys’ face between his palms. It’s not a punch, not at all. It’s a look so searching and a touch so tender that something inside Rhys threatens to shiver and snap. Then Vaughn’s drawing him down for a kiss—and a _serious_ one, one deeper and more desperate than Rhys was at all prepared for.

It floods him with so much dizzy sensation that he can’t tell he’s actually falling until he hits the bed.

The breath goes from him then, and it doesn’t help that they have to adjust, have to crawl back across the expanse of the enormous mattress, but then Vaughn’s pressed against him, straddling him, the heat of him so apparent that Rhys can’t help but buck his hips in response. Vaughn’s making such extraordinary little moans, and his utter carelessness as he flings aside his glasses and starts doing the same with his clothes proves in every way how much Rhys has struck a nerve.

His own nerves are utterly singing with it. 

For a minute he keeps thinking of his ECHO glitch, the time he'd nearly overloaded with wayward electrical signals, because that's what this is like: so much of a shock to the system, so fast. His whole body aches, and his hands keep fumbling, but it's so _good_ , Vaughn’s sheer physicality anchoring him while everything else flies to pieces. 

It's so different this time than last, with Vaughn so much more in control. He wrestles off their clothes with swift determination, then pushes Rhys back against the expensive duvet. Rhys distantly realizes they're about to ruin it. He just doesn't _care_.

God, but could he ever get used to this.

They fall into another long kiss there, one only broken when Vaughn pulls back to say hoarsely, “Hang on.” Rhys’ lip stings when they part; to his surprise, Vaughn’s bitten it. “Let me—”

Rhys sees him reach back for the supplies. For the first time he starts to tense up again at the implications. So for a second he shuts his eyes, concentrating on breathing in a long, steady pace—not easy, but steady. He finds himself tracing his fingertips up and down his sternum with the motion, enjoying the feel of it against over-sensitive skin.

That’s when the sound of Vaughn rustling through things slowly trails off, and Rhys opens his eyes enough to see him there at the foot of the bed, watching Rhys move.

Rhys lets his fingers trail a little lower this time. 

“Like what you see?” he murmurs, his fingertips brushing into the light line of hair below his navel. The next step is obvious, but he waits where he is, tracing idle little patterns.

Well, perhaps not so idle. His cock still twitches, even untouched. He never quite knew he could get this much of a rush just from being a tease, but watching Vaughn’s face as he finally dares to curl his fingers around himself is goddamn _amazing_.

Still, it doesn't last very long—two good, thorough strokes, just enough to make his toes curl—before Vaughn’s surging forward, knocking his hand out of the way. When Rhys’ eyes widen, he says softly but intensely, “That’s _mine._ ” Rhys’ head falls back with the shock of it, with Vaughn’s slick hand around him, with Vaughn acting like this at _all_ , because holy shit, that's even more of a turn-on…

But he's also remembering a certain lecture about just how much Vaughn would push himself for Rhys’ sake. So he tries to meet him move for move. He lets himself writhe with it, touches Vaughn all over, tangles his hands in Vaughn’s hair and pulls him close to kiss him, again, again, drinking in that helpless little moan and returning it at twice the volume. He wants Vaughn to feel just as good, wants him to believe every bit of this. Besides, the heat in him is almost unbearably intense now, and it’s got to go _somewhere_.

When he hitches his knees up alongside Vaughn’s hips, Vaughn, trembling a little, takes the hint.

The first press of his fingers is strange, but not entirely unfamiliar. Rhys has tried a few things on his own, at least. But it's still new this way, and he’s trying hard not to think of how he'd messed this up with Vaughn last time…and fuck, just at the hint of that memory, he’s gone tense again. Vaughn pauses and whispers, “You okay?”

Rhys nods tightly. “Just…just keep moving.”

Vaughn nods too, more slowly. He bends down and presses a kiss to Rhys’ chest, right over one of the tattoos. Then he slides in deeper, adds a second finger, starts to stretch. 

It's—strange, Rhys thinks, a little sore, but not bad, and suddenly he’s just plain impatient, wanting this to _happen_ before he can make himself nervous again. He rocks his hips once while Vaughn is still working him, making Vaughn hiss in a breath.

“ _Dammit_ , Rhys,” he curses. And he’s not without his own physical reaction, either. His hips are quaking with the effort not to move.

Well, then.

Rhys angles himself a little differently and rocks up once more, just to make a point. It makes Vaughn’s fingers press in again, going further, touching something inside—and oh, yeah, that's different.

That's a _good_ different.

Rhys breathes in roughly, suddenly aware that when he'd tried this with his own hand, somewhat uncomfortably, and had quit before he found the right angle, he'd missed out on a few things.

“Vaughn,” he breathes after a few more touches, gripping the other man’s shoulders tightly enough that Vaughn gasps. He remembers too late to ease up with the robotic hand. “Come on, please.”

“Are you…?”

“ _Yes,_ ” he says explosively, not even sure what question he's answering, and not caring. Just _yes yes yes, please, I want to feel you; do it before we both lose our nerve._

Vaughn bites his lip and levers Rhys’ knees up higher. It leaves Rhys a moment to feel like he should have planned this better, because he _knows_ he's all legs, the angle’s probably ridiculous and surely he’ll cramp up and he can't _help_ but feel self-conscious…but Vaughn’s working with it anyway, settling close, and there's that click again of the tube of gel and a little wet slide and gasp before he's moving and—and—

And _oh, God._

He cries out, can't help it, because yes, it hurts. But he doesn't let Vaughn stop, even when Vaughn, stricken at the look on his face, very nearly pulls away. Rhys just holds on as the burning stretch slowly becomes a known quantity, something easier to handle. Then, once Vaughn slides back, holds there for a moment, and tries again, it all begins to feel…new, and raw, and dangerously good. Rhys shakes sweat and an errant teardrop or two from his eyes. Vaughn’s trying to be careful, he can tell, but they're really past that point already. There's only one way through this, and it's straight on until the end.

Well. Maybe _straight_ isn’t the best word.

The thought makes him laugh with what little breath he’s got. When confusion flickers over Vaughn’s face, Rhys tugs him in, kisses him the rest of the way breathless, and rasps, “Harder.”

“Rhys—”

The words spill out in a rush. “It's all right, I trust you, I need this, _please_.”

Vaughn shuts his eyes, shaking with his effort at restraint. His lips silently move in a litany Rhys only recognizes from knowing him this long. It's a string of numbers—of course it's numbers—in a unbroken cascade, something else to focus on, anything to calm himself down.

It just normally doesn't end with “oh, fucking _hell,”_ and a sound half like a laugh, half like desire as he gives in.

When his hips snap forward, it jolts Rhys back on the bed with surprising force. The second thrust hits something dark and deep that makes Rhys shout out loud, unprepared for that wave of pleasure radiating through his core.

Vaughn, being Vaughn, makes note. He remembers that angle exactly. And he thrusts again. And _again._

Rhys arches back under it all, shoulders digging into the mattress, his neck exposed, both eyes squeezed shut. He can hear every groan Vaughn makes, feel his own tear out of his throat. It’s all almost too much, but now that it’s happening, he doesn’t want it to _stop_.

“Rhys,” Vaughn says, his voice strangely choked. “Look at me. Please.”

It’s like pulling himself up through deep water, but he does. He gasps in air at the same instant his eyes open, and his ECHO eye flares so bright he can see the blue glow reflected right back at him.

Under that light, Vaughn heaves in a breath, closes his hand around Rhys’ cock, and strokes firmly and fast. Rhys doesn’t stand a chance at holding himself back from that—and he doesn’t want to. He just lets himself go. He’s coming, struck suddenly silent with the force of it as it shudders all the way through him. All his muscles clench and his grip tightens, urging Vaughn on—and oh _God_ he can feel it when that makes Vaughn lose control, too, moving deep and hard inside him. And that _look_ in his eyes is—just—

Rhys whispers Vaughn’s name as he comes, and he doesn’t look away.

In the aftermath, they keep on watching each other. Rhys wonders distantly what he looks like right now to prompt _that_ expression. And when he reaches up with one shaky hand to touch Vaughn’s cheek, marveling at what he’s seeing, too, Vaughn turns into the touch and lets out a long sigh.

Finally, carefully, he moves.

It’s a gradual, cautious readjustment for them both. Rhys gasps at the feeling as Vaughn slips free of him, and then again with faint pain as he tries to stretch back out. Vaughn helps him, rubbing sore muscles and easing him down onto the bed. When Rhys feels the repeated stroke of those fingers, the soft, unexpected kiss to one trembling thigh, it all begins to ache in a new sort of way—one that makes his pulse thrum again, his fingers tremble. When Vaughn backs away even just for a brief moment to discard his condom, the absence hurts.

“Vaughn,” he says at last, his voice hoarse. 

He turns back to look. “What is it?”

Rhys doesn’t answer. He just urges Vaughn back to the center of the bed, and wraps one arm around him. For a little while all he can really do is hold on, feeling himself slowly fall into the same rhythm as Vaughn’s breathing. Vaughn doesn’t seem to mind. Then Rhys kisses him, soft and slow. His mouth’s closed, lips barely moving, his hand braced only lightly against the curve of Vaughn’s back. And in part it’s because he doesn’t trust himself to make a sound. The question he wants to ask is right there behind his lips, and he knows it’s too big for such a small word; it simply means too much right now, and he’d be taking advantage. It’s just that they’re so close, and it’s so _good,_ and maybe he can’t keep this but oh, God, he _wants—_

He still whispers the question silently against Vaughn’s mouth, because _everything_ aches now, in a familiar, wonderful, terrible way, and he’s afraid he knows now what that feeling is.

 _Stay?_ he asks, and holds on tight. 

Vaughn doesn’t say a word. He doesn't have to. For that night at least, the answer’s _yes_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was initially going to have a different ending, but oh, these two. Certain events will have to be shifted to the following day. Rhys just had to get all hopelessly romantic on me first...
> 
> Intimacy kits at hotels, by the way? 100% a real thing, and something I first encountered in an unnervingly high-end hotel next door to the Bar Association of New York (please, add your own joke about lawyers), where I was staying during a business trip.* Suffice it to say, I did not want that sucker to show up on my expense report. But I suspect Hyperion would care a little less. ;)
> 
> *...on the dime of a company that makes this WAY FUNNIER, but as I said in another fic: discretion, valor, etc.


	7. Sleepless

Rhys doesn’t even know what time it is when he wakes. It’s dark in the room, calm and quiet, and he lies there just breathing it in.

Vaughn’s still asleep beside him. They’d gotten into the bed together eventually, after a lot of sleepy rearranging and fumbling with too many layers. The dirtied duvet’s still on the floor where they’d pushed it aside, along with half of the surfeit of pillows. “I don’t know how rich people _sleep,_ ” Vaughn had muttered, to which Rhys had just smiled. Sure, a rejoinder would have been easy— _oh, with enough money to afford this place, I’d sleep just_ fine—but Vaughn did have a point: the bed was, in the end, a little bit much.

Still, this space they have between them now...that’s a different sort of thing.

Vaughn’s close by, enough to feel his warmth beneath the sheets, enough that his curled-up hand atop the mattress is a short reach away from Rhys’ own. Rhys had teased him earlier about snoring, but he’s not doing that now. He’s just breathing slow and easy, with his lips slightly parted. Rhys’ urge to trace the curve of that lower lip with one thumb is almost irresistible.

Rhys makes himself put his hand down, though, before he gives in to another notion and gently curls his fingers over Vaughn’s instead. The contact’s light enough that he doesn’t stir. Rhys, remembering, rubs his thumb over the back of Vaughn’s hand before he goes still again. He lies there for a while propped carefully on one side, just watching him, before his eye brightens subtly and blinks.

Photo functionality doesn’t come standard in ECHO eye systems. It’s one of Hyperion’s few, if begrudging and cosmetic, concessions to privacy. But Rhys had quietly hacked that weeks ago, and so he’d looked down at their hands and let himself capture a single image: nothing he’d ever share, just for himself, a little memory preserved.

He files that away. Then slowly, and very carefully, he gets up from the bed.

The bathroom’s not far off. Motion-sensor lights come on slowly as he enters and slides the door shut. Still moving cautiously and blinking hard even under low light—the ECHO eye may adjust automatically, but his human eye’s taking its time catching up—Rhys takes a minute to use the toilet, then to ponder the room’s immense shower. He counts the jets twice, marveling at the mind that engineered that thing. It’s so, so tempting to step inside. Knowing the sound would wake Vaughn up, though, he regretfully turns away, runs a washcloth under warm water instead, and braces his cybernetic hand against the countertop for balance as he bends to carefully stroke that cloth along several stretches of sensitive skin.

The light’s warmed up enough by then that, to his surprise, he can also see several faint bruises. 

Rhys sets the cloth aside and studies himself for a while, mapping the marks against remembered handholds. None of it had been from overt manhandling, exactly, just…intensity. There’s one clear thumbprint on his shoulder, another dark shadow at his hip. He especially lingers at one bruise on his inner thigh, where he presses gingerly at the sore spot as if he needs the extra confirmation of its existence.

“God _damn,_ Vaughn,” he murmurs, impressed.

Then he lifts his head and eyes his own reflection.

The room’s built for this, its mirrors angled cannily to show their subjects at all angles. While Rhys has never been body-shy, even he’s struck by how intimate the view is. He turns slightly toward the full-length pane, glancing down the length of his body and unconsciously posing a little, showing off the most sensitive details. He looks…more than a little debauched, honestly. He’s marked up and tousled, with color rising again in his cheeks. His eyes are bright and wide, and his chest’s rapidly rising and falling with quick, shallow breaths, like he’s been startled by his own regard.

He recognizes that look now, is the strangest part. It’s just kind of part of him now—this more sensuous side of himself, always just a little shocked into the forefront. And of all the people to get him here…

He flashes onto a memory of last night and watches himself shiver, strangely fascinated by how that makes him look. Then, right on the edge of it becoming too much, he pulls back. One breath. Two. He sets his shoulders and tries to give his reflection a careless, crooked smile. If he has to admit it to himself, it’s like he’s trying to gain _some_ control back, to push these feelings safely away until he looks more like the confident, savvy self he tries to project to the world. 

It takes a minute. It…sort of works.

But when that hand he’s cocked into a finger gun drops back down, it settles onto his chest. He watches himself slide it over once more, carefully, thoughtfully, to touch one of the bruises again. The subtle, aching pain of it is almost erotic.

He shuts his eyes before he can see himself react to _that_ one.

He also has to admit that part of him has started to wonder: _Feeling like this, all the time…what would that make of me, exactly?_

Rhys breathes in hard, lets it out only with difficulty. Then he _has_ to stop. He breaks away, steps out and shuts the door, and—with a little uncertainty admittedly following him—heads back toward the bed.

His eyes haven’t readjusted to the dimness yet. On the way, he nearly steps on something.

It’s not much of a surprise. really. They’d strewn things everywhere last night, since Vaughn hadn’t exactly been concentrating on his aim. But Rhys still goes wide-eyed when he realizes what it is. The details are indistinct through the dark, but the shape alone makes it obvious when he stoops to pick the object up. It’s Vaughn’s glasses.

He lifts them up to the window and the faint, false light outside, watching the world distort through the lenses. Then he notices a faint flicker of green. A blinking light. Data transfer.

Feeling curious, Rhys brings the glasses back with him to the bed.

Vaughn mumbles quietly when Rhys settles back down, but he doesn’t wake. Rhys positions himself as carefully as possible, sitting with his back to the remaining mound of pillows. For a while he just turns the glasses around in midair, studying them from various angles. He’s _seen_ them before, of course, countless times, but never quite like this. Vaughn’s normally so possessive about them. Rhys had teased him about stealing the glasses for himself, back in his pre-ECHO days, but Vaughn had flat-out refused to let Rhys even try them.

So Rhys hesitates, he honestly does, but finally he slips them on and taps the activation button on the left.

Text scrolls down over his vision in a quick cascade. It’s not as sophisticated as his own ECHO interface, especially since it requires manual buttons, and it’s a much more limited data stream. But it’s not entirely unfamiliar, either. Rhys pokes through it, curious as to what’s there. Work files, mostly. A perpetual connection to the accounting department, and a list of open projects. None of those mean much to Rhys, but he can’t help but notice the flags, because there are delivery dates looming. What gives Rhys a nervous twinge is that a lot of them are dangerously close. Vaughn is not the sort of person to ignore deadlines, and these aren’t targets he can afford to miss if he doesn’t want management swinging the hammer. A very, very unforgiving hammer.

Rhys glances sidelong at Vaughn. These projects are too complex to delay by just hacking a few dates for him again. And Rhys probably shares the blame for Vaughn being late in the first place. All of this between them lately…Rhys has been distracting him. Hell, he’s been distracting _himself._

And Hyperion’s even less forgiving if you fuck up your commitments to the company because you’re too busy being committed to people.

Rhys flinches and rubs his forehead. He’s suddenly recalling a couple in his old department whose marriage didn’t survive—literally—a set of bad performance reviews. He hadn’t thought about them in years, he’d honestly thought _himself_ that they were getting too carried away, but…

His own reflection a few minutes ago had looked pretty goddamn carried away. He has no way to deny that part anymore.

 _Fuck,_ Rhys thinks. He taps at the frames again, moving into an email window.

Despite the creeping feeling that he shouldn't be looking at this, he skims over subject lines. Work, work, someone acknowledging a declined happy hour invitation…Rhys frowns at the man’s name, wondering, but lets it go. There’s another mail below it that he recognizes, after all: Rhys had written it himself. It’s full of shorthand and sidelong references to Rhys’ latest plan to get into Henderson’s favor. It’s still unanswered. He winces again, realizing he hasn’t even thought of it in days. How could he not have thought of it? He looks at his cybernetic hand, feeling queasy. That was the entire _point._  

Even more uneasily now, he toggles over to the single message still sitting in Drafts. Somehow it’s not what he expected, but it’s the last thing that should have surprised him.

It’s a confirmation of a rental agreement, addressed to Helios Residential Services and already digitally signed. It’s about the new apartment. Vaughn just hasn’t sent it yet. Rhys stares at it, looking at the diagram of the one-bedroom unit, the floor number— _fuck, it’s so far away—_ and the scratchy lines of Vaughn’s signature. The SEND button, up there in the corner of his vision, blinks for his attention.

Rhys’ finger hovers over the frames, trembling slightly in midair, while too many of his thoughts collide all at once.

It would be so easy—and such a terrible, terrible idea—to delete it. He knows it would be spiteful, not to mention ultimately pointless. But the urge still flickers in a jealous little corner of his mind. The rest of him, though…the rest of him has another idea, one tinged with reluctance and more than a little deja vu. He keeps thinking about the night he had to be urged to sign and submit the release form about his ECHO-implant procedure. The time Vaughn had to give him a push.

He doesn’t even want to think this, not here and not now…but he’s starting to suspect it’s his turn to return the favor.

 _It’s too much,_ he thinks, about all of it: the unfinished work, their delayed plans, his own worries and that unfading ache in his chest. His expression in the mirror. The photo in his memory. _We’re going to slip up. We’re_ already _slipping up. And we’ll either hurt each other or break something we can’t fix, or we won’t finish what we started, or… God, this company solves its employee problems with_ airlocks; _we can’t just lose focus and pretend it doesn’t matter._

 _Maybe Vaughn really was right, before I tried to change his mind. If we backed off just a little, had some space and room to breathe…_  

He can’t breathe right while thinking like this, is the problem. Why does he have to be panicking again, right after everything had been so good? Why does it suddenly have to _hurt?_

Vaughn shifts slightly in the bed, making another quiet noise. Rhys jerks alert, then softens, almost slumps, wanting more than anything to curl up next to him and forget he ever opened that message. He could still pretend he didn’t. He can lie. Or…or he could confess it all instead, wake Vaughn up, tell him what he’s thinking, tell him _why…_

But he knows that if he does, he won’t finish. He’ll end up being selfish. He really will tell Vaughn to stay. And Vaughn will do what Vaughn always does when Rhys pushes for something. He’ll protest, maybe; fuss, probably; worry for weeks, assuredly…but he’ll still follow Rhys right along. And they won’t turn back even if they should.

So there’s really only one choice that makes any sense. Even if it isn’t what he wants. Not in the _least._

He clenches his fingers and presses the button to send the mail.

The interface of these glasses is purely visual, so there’s no sound to accompany the message as it goes. Rhys’ breath leaving him all at once fills the gap a little too well.

In the empty minutes that follow, no amount of telling himself that it’s not like this has to _end_ anything really sticks. He knows they can still see each other, still….do things together, still plot and plan and work toward coming out on top so they can make the rules, and so none of these worries will ever matter again. But none of that’s making him feel any better. Because _he_ pulled the trigger. Now Vaughn moving out is going to be Rhys’ fault, not Vaughn’s decision. And Vaughn could very well end up hating him for that.

 _Shit,_ he thinks dully. _What did I just_ do _?_

He powers down the glasses, but doesn’t take them off. And he sits there in the dark, still listening to Vaughn's breathing alongside the erratic thud of his own heart, and wondering in a lost sort of way how he’s going to let that go now.


	8. Waking

He doesn’t get back to sleep after that, not really. He fades in and out for a while. Some of his dreams are subconscious inventions, and some look like data again—lines of text, extruded blueprints of a certain one-bedroom apartment, endless columns of calculations running down its walls.

The only interruption to the flow is one furtive photograph.

Rhys finally comes to when Vaughn begins stirring, and bumps his shoulder with that same hand as he stretches.

With some difficulty, Rhys props himself up against the pillows and fuzzily looks down. Vaughn’s yawning, his eyes still screwed shut. Then he squints one of them open. “Hey, you,” Vaughn says, his voice sleepy and sexy in a way Rhys really isn’t prepared for. It’s the softness to it, the surprise and subsequent warmth. “You’re here.”

Rhys swallows hard. “Of course I’m here,” he says.

Vaughn smiles. One hand reaches up, just barely touching him, the backs of his knuckles brushing thoughtfully across that bruise on Rhys’ shoulder. Then his gaze drifts up further. “Mmh. Hey, why’re you wearing my…”

Rhys makes a guilty little start. Somehow, he’d never put Vaughn’s glasses back onto the bedside table. “Um.”

“Not that I don’t like the look,” Vaughn adds, his lips twitching with amusement as Rhys fumbles to adjust the glasses atop his nose. He has the feeling he’ll have another bruise there, just from the weight of the thing.

“Hah. Y…you like me in nerd chic, is that it?”

“Well, I’m obviously not the only one here who’s into it.”

Rhys eyes Vaughn, whose smile has turned suspiciously smug. He can’t help but laugh despite it all. “Touché.” He slides the glasses off, trying not to look guilty. “Anyway. It was just kind of a…stupid idea, is all.”

“An idea about what?”

Vaughn sits up against the pillows beside him. The sheets slide down his body in the process, far enough below his navel now to reveal the start of dark curls. Below that, even if things are still obscured, Rhys can make out the shape of him—standing, Rhys can’t help but notice, slightly erect.

Considering what he’s going to have to tell Vaughn in short order, what he’s thinking of is ridiculous, and irresponsible, and a _terrible_ idea—and still the only thing in the world he actually wants to do.

He impulsively says, “I don’t know. I think I’m starting to have a better idea.”

Vaughn lifts his eyebrows as Rhys sets the glasses aside—about as far away from Vaughn as he can manage on this giant goddamned bed—before returning his attention to the sheets. Slowly, he starts tugging them lower in Vaughn’s lap. Vaughn sucks in a breath.

Rhys looks up at him then, his eyes slightly hooded. And he tries not to gasp when he finally sees the dark bruises on Vaughn’s left arm, shaped suspiciously like his own robotic hand. Vaughn may have marked him in his own way last night, but Rhys had left outright wounds. His stomach twists at it.

But he keeps going with what he’s doing, finishes pulling the sheets away, and drops his gaze, both to get away from those bruises and to ponder what’s in front of him. When he nudges his hand forward, it’s to slip his thumb along the underside of Vaughn’s cock, and to rub softly up and down right at the base. The way Vaughn swears and swells under the touch is way more satisfying than anything should be.

Rhys flashes one more look at him and deliberately licks his lips. “Can I?”

Vaughn’s eyes widen. “ _Can_ you—” he repeats, before he outright groans. “Oh, my God, do you know how many dreams I’ve had that started like this?”

Rhys can’t hold back a smile, however regretful it might be at the edges. He has some idea now. And the way Vaughn’s fingers tentatively go to his hair when Rhys lowers his head just about kills him. The soft but overwhelming _want_ implied there is _so goddamn obvious._

He’s still kicking himself for not noticing sooner, when they still might have had more time to figure all this out.

For now, he’s about to try something else he’s never done. He hopes like all hell he can make it amazing, because he feels like he owes Vaughn everything he’s got.

He starts with light presses of his lips, still moving his thumb, nosing a little along his length. Vaughn jerks a little and gasps but tries to stay still. Rhys understands the feeling. He suspects the main challenge here will be not overreacting, either to the rush of sensory input or the thought, still hard to process, of _what he’s doing._ It’s not long before Rhys just closes his eyes, trying to narrow down his focus.

Then he starts taking Vaughn into his mouth, inexpertly but as thoroughly as he can. Even though he’s struggling a little to adjust, not moving as smoothly as he wishes he could, it seems to be enough, _more_ than enough, judging by Vaughn’s voice. Or his hand tightening in Rhys’ hair. Or, after one long slide of Rhys’ tongue, the uncontrolled forward jolt of his hips that Rhys almost can’t handle.

“Sorry, sorry,” he hears—and he’s never heard Vaughn’s voice quite like that, so breathy and tense. When Vaughn tugs him back, Rhys is so startled again that he goes along, his eyes flying open again. “You’re gonna…I’m almost…”

Rhys gulps, his eyes watering. “Don’t you…want me to finish?”

“Oh, God. Yes, but…”

Rhys takes a second to breathe deep and collect himself. “Then _let me,_ ” he says.

Vaughn’s eyes go round. Whatever’s going through his head, Rhys doesn’t wait for him to explain it. He just bends back down and takes Vaughn in. This time, understanding better what he has to do, he goes even deeper, outright encouraging Vaughn to move as his hips tremble and his muscles tense. And he’s so thick and hot in Rhys’ mouth, nudging into his throat, so heavy on his tongue, and he can _feel_ it when Vaughn starts to go—

He stays put when Vaughn pulls on his hair this time, and he can’t quite swallow it all down when Vaughn comes, but he tries. When he pulls back at last, gasping and wiping at his wet mouth with the back of his hand, he looks up to see Vaughn staring at him before he, too, gives in to the need for air, and falls back against the pillows to breathe.

He’s also almost laughing in amazement.

“Holy crap,” Vaughn whispers. “That…just happened.”

Before Rhys can even begin to process that echo of his own thoughts, Vaughn reaches down to pull him back up the bed. For a minute they just look at each other, touch each other, and then Vaughn almost shyly kisses him. He doesn’t balk at the taste of himself on Rhys’ lips. In fact, his tongue slips out to collect the last few traces from the corner of Rhys’ mouth.

Rhys hadn’t been feeling particularly aroused until then. Now he’s suddenly getting there.

“Okay,” Vaughn murmurs at last, with that little almost-laugh still in his voice. “Not that I mind…like, at _all_ …that was amazing…but what brought that on?”

“Can’t I just want to give my boyfriend a morning blow job?”

Rhys says it almost by accident. The instinct to deflect is colliding with the need to hold on, and it produces, somehow, _that_. And he watches Vaughn react to the word, however hoarsely spoken it might have been. His eyes are widening again, lips parting. Oh, God, that smile is going to _kill him_ before this is over.

Especially now that Vaughn’s glancing aside like the moment’s almost too intimate for him to handle, too. His gaze falls on the glasses again.

“Can you hand me those?” he asks.

Rhys pauses. He takes just long enough that the angle of Vaughn’s expression changes, going from giddy to thoughtful, then on to concerned. He frowns. “Wait. What _were_ you doing with them, Rhys?” 

 _Well, fuck,_ Rhys thinks, because of course Vaughn’s not stupid. Of course this was coming. Now he’s going to have to explain himself while he’s still tingling and flushed and his throat’s still sore, and he’s feeling oddly vulnerable...and _wanting._ Damn it.

He leans over, stretching out one long arm, and pulls the glasses into his grip. 

“I, um,” he says when he returns to center. He swivels the glasses back and forth in his hands before reluctantly handing them over. “Might have taken a peek.”

Vaughn’s frown goes deeper. Then he slides the glasses on and wakes up the screen.

Rhys hadn’t navigated out of the drafts folder before shutting things down, so Vaughn sees immediately what he’s done.

“ _Wait_ ,” he says again, sitting up straighter, navigating to another pane. Rhys can see the rapid flicker of backwards words on the opposite side of Vaughn’s lenses. He sits back, his hands dropping into his lap, and he fiddles anxiously with his robotic hand while Vaughn reads. “Where’s the—”

He breaks off suddenly. Rhys flinches.

“You _sent_ it?” Vaughn asks, disbelieving.

“Yeah,” Rhys says, his voice muted and strange.

Vaughn just gapes at him. Then he pulls up Residential Services’ reply. “Received and timestamped at 03:47, sent for processing, room claim locked…it’s…what the _hell,_ Rhys?”

“I know, I know.” He puts his head in his hands, suddenly talking all in a rush. “I just couldn’t sleep and I couldn’t stop thinking about what you’d said about that apartment, and, um, your reasons. And, well, you were right, I knew it. But I was afraid after last night we wouldn’t make the right choice, so—”

“So after last night, which was _your idea,_ you dug through my personal files, and you messed with them without asking, and then you tried to, what, manipulate me into not caring? You think _that’s_ the right choice?”

“Vaughn!”

“No, you’re right,” Vaughn says, his voice brittle. “That’s how you do things. I knew that. But if you can’t figure out not to do it with _me,_ then we really shouldn’t be living together.”

Rhys already knew this was going to be bad, but that still hits him like a punch to the gut. It’s the _that’s how you do things_ that hurts the worst. Vaughn really does know him too well. He’s seen—and helped with—too much of Rhys’ scheming, and Rhys doesn’t know now how to convince him of how he feels without it just looking like more of the same.

He closes his mouth, not knowing what to say.

While he watches— _and seriously,_ he thinks when he sees what's happening, _fuck_ everything—a tear starts rolling down Vaughn’s face. When Vaughn swipes at it like he’s furious at it for existing, it knocks his glasses sideways. With a sudden growl of frustration, he grabs at them, yanks them off his face, and pitches them with all the force he’s got across the room.

When they hit the wall, they break.

Rhys jumps. Vaughn barely even reacts. He just sits there, his eyes closed, breathing hard. Rhys watches for a few helpless moments before he makes himself back away, get up, and walk across the room.

There, he gingerly picks up the glasses, trying not to damage the bent frames any worse.

Nobody says anything for a while. Finally Rhys goes to find his bag. After a minute of rustling through clothes he never even got as far as hanging up, he retrieves a small case, taking both it and the glasses with him as he goes to sit in a nearby chair.

It takes a few minutes, but Vaughn finally asks him, “What are you _doing_?”

Rhys huffs. The scene probably does look ridiculous, come to think of it: him still naked and sitting cross-legged in a ridiculously plush chair, playing at being a repairman. But for the last few weeks since his arm installation, he’s been hauling around a maintenance kit for any fine-tuning or adjustments, just in case. While the tools aren’t exactly designed for glasses like Vaughn’s, it’s as good as he’s going to get. So he pulls out a small set of pliers and bends, go figure, the right arm of the glasses back into place. 

“I’m fixing your shit, is what I’m doing,” Rhys tells him.

This time, Vaughn’s the one with nothing to say. Rhys goes on working, his jaw tight.

“I know how much these cost you.” He pauses to pinch something else back into shape and test the connection. “You’re not the only one who pays attention to money. You’re lucky you didn’t break the lenses with that stunt, by the way, because if those were cracked, I couldn’t help you. And you need these to work. Because you need to _do_ your damn work. If you get behind, you are going to get your ass fired, and sometimes they do that with _guns_ around here, in case you’ve forgotten.”

“Rhys,” Vaughn says quietly. Going by the tone of his voice, he has some idea of what other files Rhys dug into. And he sounds less mad about that than he does guilty.

“I have watched people get ruined for less,” Rhys goes on, his voice still rough, and getting more so. “And I am not having that happen to you, I _cannot_ lose you, so how about you trust me with this much?”

His own eyes are blurring now, which doesn’t help. It’s hard enough getting the dexterity he needs with his metal fingers, and he doesn’t want to crunch something or slip up. He shuts his eyes for a second, wipes them dry, steadies himself, and then returns to the glasses, focusing on nothing else. It looks like it’s the data link across the bridge that’s still faulty. He angles the glasses a little differently and adjusts a wire.

He can hear something across the room, but he doesn’t look to see what it is until he settles the glasses back on his own nose, hits a button, and sees a cascade of data run down the lenses. He sighs, lifts his head, and sees Vaughn standing there behind the sea of numbers.

Rhys taps the button to turn the data connection off. For a minute they both just look at each other, and then Vaughn crouches down before the chair, kneels really, in a way that makes an odd, anxious tingle go up Rhys’ spine. Feeling like he has to do something, Rhys pulls off the glasses, slides them over Vaughn’s ears instead, and nudges them the rest of the way into place with a gentle push on the bridge.

“There you are,” he whispers.

Vaughn tests them too, but only half-heartedly. Rhys can tell his concentration is elsewhere. Finally he just sighs, looks up at Rhys and says quietly, “I understand, I think. I’m sorry.”

“Me too,” Rhys says hoarsely. “Just…oh, God, please, get up, you’re making me nervous.”

Vaughn takes the tools out of Rhys’ hands and sets them aside, then stands. But Rhys catches his wrist at the same time and pulls. Rhys straightens his legs as Vaughn goes off balance, and tugs until Vaughn’s in the chair, too, knees braced on either side of Rhys’ hips.

“Oh,” Vaughn says, a little startled. Then, as he settles, he almost smiles. “This, uh…does this make you _less_ nervous?”

Rhys curls his arms around him. “Not really.”

Vaughn snorts and shakes his head. It ends with him pressed forehead to forehead with Rhys, noses bumping, glasses assuredly getting smudged. “God, Rhys. Why is this so hard to get right?”

“I don’t know. Maybe…” He holds on with the metal hand, slowly stroking the real one up and down Vaughn’s back, and hoping it eases the sting of what he’s saying. “Maybe we _can’t._ Hyperion…this place just isn’t built for this. Screwing around, yeah. But this? Us…?” 

Vaughn looks like he wants to protest, but he can’t, not really. “Maybe.”

“But seriously, once we…once we finish we can change things.”

“And how far off is that?”

Rhys thinks about it. He doesn’t want to say he doesn’t know. His shoulders move in the tiniest shrug, though, and when Vaughn feels it, he sighs. “Right.”

The quiet resignation there hurts. Rhys holds on tighter. “We’ll figure out something. I promise. I _promise_.” He hesitates, suddenly struggling to get the words out past that ache in his chest again. “You know I…” 

Vaughn, waiting, looks like he’s straining to hear what Rhys didn’t quite voice. It’s enough to make it inevitable. Everything’s so warm and close that for once, he can’t not say it.

“You know I love you, right?” Rhys whispers.

The silence between them practically rings. Rhys lifts his head until he’s right within kissing distance, where he can feel Vaughn’s ragged breathing. Vaughn finally reaches up, running his fingertips along the edge of Rhys’ jaw until he can tilt his chin up the rest of the way. The kiss is just a whisper in its own way, an echo, and it’s over almost before Rhys knows it’s happening—but it shivers all the way through him, and that part doesn’t stop.

Even when Vaughn pulls back, one thumb to Rhys’ lips, and says, “Come on. It’s checkout time soon.”

His hand withdraws.

Rhys doesn’t know quite what to do when he finds himself alone in the chair.

When he catches back up with the world, blinking through much brighter light, Vaughn’s already moving around the room, finding things, trying to clean up some of the mess. While Rhys wants to tell him he can stop, they have staff for that here, he can’t make himself say anything. Instead, he just watches. Watches Vaughn put everything away and try to go back to normal.

He doesn’t miss the way Vaughn has to press a hand to his forehead and catch his breath halfway through, though. And when Vaughn picks up his own discarded clothes, he looks at the crumpled fabric in his hands like he doesn’t know what to do with it. He looks like he wants to be done, they _have_ to be done, but… 

No, it’s not quite over yet.

Rhys finally gets up and goes to him.

“Hey,” he says softly, standing right behind him. “Vaughn.”

He doesn’t reply right away. He’s still turning the shirt over in his hands. Rhys puts a hand to his shoulder.

“We’ve got a _little_ while left,” Rhys says. 

Vaughn still doesn’t take the bait. Rhys doesn’t want to overdo it, but he still squeezes Vaughn’s shoulder, just gently, and Rhys offers what little he dares. “We ought to do something good here before we go. Shame not to. Even if…God, I don’t know, it can just be breakfast, or another game together, or… _something._ ”

“I need to take a shower,” Vaughn says.

He could be cutting Rhys off. He could be making a hint. Rhys isn’t sure which, but to hell with it, there isn’t much left to lose: he might as well. “We _could_ share the shower.”

Vaughn slowly turns around. Before Rhys can babble out anything else— _come on, the shower’s the size of your old bedroom, it would be a crime to let all that go to waste—_ Vaughn takes a deep breath. Then he laughs, maybe at himself, maybe at Rhys, maybe at the whole damn universe.

“That what you had in mind when you came over?” he finally asks.

“Hah, well. Um. Maybe.”

“You’re impossible,” Vaughn replies, but he doesn’t say no. He keeps not saying no when Rhys backs him slowly toward the bathroom door, watching carefully for his reaction. Vaughn looks thoughtful still, but…open. Waiting. The shirt gets discarded along the way. So, much more carefully this time, do the glasses.

And the not-saying-no turns much more distinctly into _yes_ when Vaughn pulls Rhys with him through the door, and shortly thereafter, into the shower. It’s his hand on the lever that turns it on.

 _Literally,_ Rhys thinks a second later, gasping under Vaughn's touch, _and…um…figuratively._

After that, there’s really nothing left to question.

So their last time, at least for a long while, happens in clouds of steam and rushing water, their hands all over each other, bodies pressed against glass. They don’t even try to be careful, not even if they should. They just give in to instinct and impulse and let it happen. When it ends, it’s with Rhys coming deep inside Vaughn, shouting with it and pulling him right along over the edge.

It feels so good it almost breaks him.

And he ends up standing there shaking, thinking frustratingly pointless thoughts. If only he’d been able to do that on the first try—if he’d done all of this differently, _all_ of it, known how to do it right—

But it’s too late for that, too late for much of anything else. His ECHO alert pings soon enough, reminding him that the clock’s still ticking. He ignores it for a minute more in order to stand there with Vaughn under the jets, holding on fiercely as if he can stop this, too, from washing away.

Vaughn hangs on as if he’s thinking the same thing.

At least in here, if there are tracks running down Rhys’ face that have nothing to do with the water, no one will ever have to know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, there will be a coda to this, bridging events here with the beginning of the game timeframe (and, of course, looking ahead to The Spaces We Share). I just need a bit of time to recover first, because oh, man, this part... :)
> 
> Thanks for reading so far, and for your kudos and comments. I always love hearing from people!
> 
> And on that topic, for those of you who've been reading since the earlier parts of this fic series: siebrs posted a lovely pair of pictures for Choices and Consequences and ...And Complications Unforeseen (indisputably my most awkwardly punctuated title, hah). Do go give it a look! http://actualrhis.tumblr.com/post/134661792871/this-fic-has-been-consuming-my-soul-for-the-good


	9. Endings and Epilogues

Rhys takes care of checking them out while Vaughn’s still getting dressed. It doesn’t take much, just a quick consult of his ECHO display and a few little data inputs, and apart from dropping off the cardkeys, they’re done. He sits there on the end of the bed for a while afterward, nudging the discarded blanket with one foot and thinking for a while.

Then Vaughn catches up with him, bag already in hand. Rhys twists his mouth in a little “okay, then” sort of expression, hefts up his own stuff, and goes for the door. After that, they leave the hotel so quickly that it’s all gone in a blur: the elevator, the smiling hostess, the gleam of the lobby, the opening doors. Rhys really only catches up with what’s happened when they’re standing under artificial sunlight. For a second he stares up toward the floor he’s just left, counting windows, scanning with his ECHO eye, trying to pinpoint which specific room was theirs. He’s still not sure.

Eventually he sighs and lets it go.

Neither of them talk much as they head away from the building. It’s a measure of how much they have on their minds that Vaughn doesn’t ask the question Rhys was expecting until they’re halfway through the plaza. “Wait. What did you do about the bill? Our incidentals?”

Rhys doesn’t lift his head. “I took care of it.”

Vaughn comes to a stop. “Hang on, that was a lot of—”

“Vaughn, I _took care of it._ ” Rhys stops, too, in the shadow of the statue. Vaughn’s looking up at him in shock, because he’s not kidding: it _was_ a lot of money. Rhys, though, shrugs. “I’d say I owe you, and that’s true. No matter what, I wouldn’t let you pay for this.”

Vaughn tries to protest, but he waves it off.

“Really, Vaughn. Don’t worry about it. And don’t look at me like I’m being _that_ generous.” He smiles crookedly. “It’s not on me, either.”

“Uh…I’m not sure I follow.” 

“Well…” Rhys lifts his robotic hand, wiggling his fingers in midair. “I _might_ have redirected the charges.”

His shoulders fall. “ _Rhys—_ ”

“And so last night’s meal and assorted…entertainments…were brought to us by that jackass PM who tried to bump me out of Project Perihelion.”

Vaughn covers half his face with one hand, watching Rhys nervously through the other eye. “Oh, my God, Rhys.”

He smiles smugly. “I know.”

“But if she figures that out…” 

“Oh, relax. You don’t think this room was booked under our real names, do you?” His eyes spark. “I mean, just think of the kind of dignitaries who stay at Tesni Suites. Politicians. Business rivals. Celebrities. Porn stars…”

Vaughn _stares_ at him, and then, on the cusp of a horrified laugh, says, “Okay, we are getting out of here _now._ ”

Rhys grins and tags along as Vaughn heads off to the transit hub. He hesitates, though, when he sees which direction Vaughn is pointed. There are high-speed shuttles available to the center of each station quadrant, and their apartment isn’t in 3.

“Are you…coming back home, at all?” Rhys says, hating how awkward he sounds about it. About _all_ of this, still. “I mean, do you need to pack, or…?”

Vaughn adjusts his grip on his bag and clears his throat. “Um. I do. But not just now.” He smiles wryly. “I’ve got to get back to the office for a while first.”

“Ah. Yeah, I guess so.”

“You probably do, too.”

Rhys rubs the back of his neck and nods. “Still making a quick stop first, though. I’ll catch up.”

Vaughn nods, too. Takes a deep breath. Thinks about it. Then before Rhys has a chance to react, Vaughn’s suddenly there, lifting up on his toes and hugging Rhys tight. For a second Rhys seizes up, hit with too many emotions all at once even to move. Then he drops his bag where they’re standing and holds on for all he’s worth. The warmth of it, of _him_ , radiates through Rhys’ whole body, still tingling in deep places when Vaughn finally pulls back.

“See you round?” Rhys says, and Vaughn nods once, just a little shakily, before he slips away and goes.

It’s a while before Rhys realizes it’s the first time in years that he’s had to ask that like a question.

—

The apartment’s not quite the way he remembers it when he gets back.

Vaughn’s obviously been in and out over the last few days, during Rhys’ bout of couch-surfing elsewhere. ( _Sulking,_ a voice in the back of his head corrects him. He doesn’t have the heart to shut it up.) Even if Vaughn hadn’t quite committed to packing up yet, he’d clearly been…sorting through things. Cleaning up. Even discarding some of his stuff entirely, from the looks of it. There’s just less of him here, somehow.

Rhys walks past the couch, trailing his fingers across the top of the cushions, then shakes his head and goes on into his own bedroom. That, at least, hasn’t changed.

Which, come to think of it, is kind of the problem.

He shuts the door, leans on it, and looks around, giving the place a much more critical survey than usual. It’s hard not to. After the hotel, everything looks familiar, certainly less pretentious, but also…kind of cheap. And he thinks—as he grimaces at the old collectibles and other crap still scattered around—it looks suddenly immature. _I should have been aiming higher than this,_ he thinks. _Maybe staying really was the easy answer._

_Maybe I’d be something better if I started over, too._

When he notices the guitar case still propped up in one corner, though, he rubs one hand over his face, sighing deeply. Keeping that thing wasn’t even his fault, not really. Vaughn hadn’t let him get rid of it. Even after the surgery made playing it a lost cause, Vaughn had kept telling him, “Someday, Rhys. Upgrades, you know? And you’ll get better and better with that hand, I know. It could still work.”

It wasn’t even the craziest idea either of them had ever had. So Rhys had conceded. And it’s still there. Waiting. Just in case.

They do have a way of talking each other into the impossible.

Most of the time, anyway.

He almost, almost reaches for the case, but his heart clenches enough at the idea that he finally makes himself stop. Instead, he throws his bag on the bed, probably with more force than it deserves, and flops down beside it with no particular grace. He’s lying on his back, staring up at the featureless ceiling. If he tilts his head back just enough, he can see the narrow horizontal window above him. It’s nothing like the view at Tesni. At least, though, there’s a little slice of the stars.

“Next place I live,” he murmurs, “it’s gonna have a _much_ better window.”

His eyes narrow at that, and his mind starts turning. And he keeps working through new ideas and plans until exhaustion finally takes over. For a little while at least, he lets himself drift off to sleep.

When he wakes and the world hasn't repaired itself without him, he makes himself get back to work.

—

“So, I gotta tell you, Rhys,” says Yvette the next day, over a corner lunch table in one of the employee commissaries. “This is…really not how I thought things were going to play out.”

 _That would make two of us,_ he thinks. But he doesn’t say it out loud. He just glances back at his palm display. Normally he doesn’t flash that around in front of just anybody, at least when he’s working on sensitive data, but this time it’s just a floorplan. So he decides to show it off, blowing up the display of the living space in his soon-to-be rental.

“This is way better laid out than the old place,” he says, pointing at various features. “I mean, check out the way they’ve got the screens mounted, and there’s space for a nicer table, and look at the kitchen—”

“Rhys, you can’t cook worth crap.”

“I can learn,” he says defensively. “Besides, what if I’ve got a…guest…who’s into it?”

 _Guest._ Right. She doesn’t look impressed at his phrasing, either. “Hmph. But really, you can afford this place yourself? I know your savings took a hit after…well, this.” She gestures at his arm.

“Enh, well. I shoved some funds around. Put a few things up for sale.” He shrugs, trying to ignore a regretful twinge about what all he’s letting go of. “I’ll figure it out.”

She takes that in, and is still eyeing him after he shuts down the display, takes a long drink of coffee, and sets down the mug.

“What?” he asks.

“You’re really okay with all this?” Yvette says, frowning. 

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Oh, gee, I don’t know.” Yvette’s tone tips straight into sarcasm. “Maybe because you basically broke up with your best friend since forever and—”

“We’re still friends, Yvette. It’s not a breakup.”

She clearly doesn’t believe him. Still, she sniffs. “Well, good, because I am _not_ officiating your custody battle over all those old Vault Break comics.”

Rhys smiles sardonically. “Funny you should mention that, since that’s part of what I sold.”

It takes Yvette a minute to react to that one. When she does, she shakes her head. “It is the end of goddamn days.”

And Rhys, for his part, hears his own voice go hard. “Jesus, it’s not important. We’re not _twelve,_ Yvette. I made a sensible decision, we’re resolving this like adults, and we’re getting back to fucking work. Got it?”

Yvette arches an eyebrow. Rhys really can’t read her right now, but he’s also severely disinclined to care how she’s feeling about this. Something about her brand of needling is getting under his skin this time.

“Fine,” she says at last. “God knows we’ve got enough to get done.”

“Yeah, we do.”

“Like finishing your job on the Perihelion reports.”

“Already on it.”

“Good.” Yvette looks like she’s about to say something else, but she pauses there, makes a face, and takes a bite of her pasta. _Mine, really,_ Rhys thinks dryly. _I’m the one paying for it._ When she speaks again, she’s fiddling anxiously with her fork. “Just…Rhys, are you really in the game right now? I know there’s a lot going on for you here…”

“I said I’m _on_ it.” He makes a face and rubs his eye. “Listen, Yvette, I’m not—I’m not okay, exactly, but I’m fine, it’s all right. I am ready and willing to get shit done. I’ll feel better if I have something to do, actually. And Vaughn’s still in on it, too, like before. We’re still talking. We’ll be fine.”

“You keep using that word.”

“Yeah, well, it’s still true. We’re—”

“I got it, you’re _fine_.” Yvette gives him another look and flips topics. “What did you say the address of this new place was, anyway?”

“It’s, um…” He remembers it, of course, but he flicks on the display anyway, pointing it out. “HR-680-10.”

“Huh.” She points at a different spot on the station map, several floors up. “And isn’t that where Vaughn’s place is?”

“Um. I guess? Why?” When she doesn’t say anything, Rhys rolls his eyes and makes a guess. “Nine floors apart. We’re hardly neighbors. God’s sake, Yvette, I’ll be living closer to _you._ ”

“Try to come by and borrow my shit, you’ll wish you’d stayed on 460.”

“Ooh,” he says, pretending to be scared. “The claws are out. Everyone, look out for the big, bad Yvette.”

“Yeah, _you_ should. Don’t forget, you still owe me.”

There’s that unreadable look again. Considering she invested herself in what he’ll _privately,_ at least, admit is a breakup, Rhys has to admit it’s probably earned. He looks away and busies himself with studying the station map instead. His own little corner of it is outlined in gold, all its edges brightly delineated. Sure enough, the apartment has a great damn window. Right over the bed.

Too bad he can’t stop wishing he could show a certain somebody the view.

He’s still dwelling on that when Yvette’s finger suddenly passes through the display, pointing at another spot on the map. Rhys lifts his gaze. “What?”

“I know the neighborhood,” she says, deceptively casually. “This block, right here? There’s a coffee shop. Salon. Crappy bar. Looks a lot less crappy after a couple moonshots and a masterblaster.”

“So?”

She shrugs, one neatly manicured nail sketching a line across the grid. “It’s about, oh, halfway between your place and Vaughn’s. Easy access from the main elevators.”

He tries to look disinterested. “Again, so?”

“Oh, come on, Rhys. You said it; you’re an _adult,_ right? You can do the math.”

He already has. _Meeting in the middle,_ Rhys thinks. _Pretty easy math._  

Yvette watches his expression shift, smiles faintly, and gets up. She doesn’t bother to bus her table. “You think about it,” she says, softly but pointedly. “I’ve got to get back to work.” 

The hint’s about as subtle as a brick. Rhys does intend to take it. But he also takes a minute more after she leaves to study the station map, dropping pins into place before he zooms out again. The golden flecks remain, three of them in a little point-to-point line across the station.

Rhys stares at them a while. Then, with a quiet, metallic click, he folds in his fingers. The light of the display goes out.

All that’s for later, he tells himself. For now, though, Yvette’s right: it’s time to get back to the office, for projects both official and…not.

He cleans up after both of their lunches and does.

—

They all exchange a lot of messages over the next several days.

Some of them are mundane and inevitable, like the notes between Rhys and Vaughn about their respective moves. Half of _those_ are about trying to find things, or finding things they didn’t expect, like Vaughn discovering two of Rhys’ t-shirts amongst the clothes he’d already carted up to 689. 

Rhys has some idea of how, and why, Vaughn got those shirts to begin with. So he tells Vaughn not to worry about it. _Just keep them,_ he says.

Vaughn doesn’t reply, but he also doesn’t return the shirts.

Yvette pings both of them a bunch of times, mostly with oblique little notes about stuff she’s dug up for them. Most of those are accompanied by reminders about things that both of them, especially Rhys, owe back to her. Rhys doesn’t reply to half of those messages either, but he _does_ send along everything she’s asking for.

Eventually.

Aside from that, the private chat channel they share is mostly quiet, although Vaughn, somewhat surprisingly, is the first one to toss a message into it again: _Saw this going around departmental mail this morning._ And the attachment is photo of a hapless tourist holding a ludicrously cute animal in some Dionysian wildlife sanctuary, getting photobombed by another critter with a much more, well, _mischievous_ streak. Yvette’s already replied by the time Rhys sees it, with a string of laughing cartoon faces that makes Rhys snort aloud at his desk and almost answer, _You’re the one poking at_ me _about being an adult?_ But he can’t spoil the moment, and so he doesn’t even comment, just sends back his own little smiley and thumbs-up.

He almost enters a heart, too. It’s only at the last second that he thinks better of it.

Before long they’re back to talking strategy, passing along catty little comments about their co-workers, and exchanging notes on things like R&D finances and the latest results from the eridium mining operation they’d had a hand in securing. It’s an easy rhythm to fall into. Comfortable. And it is, Rhys has to admit, slightly misleading—because more of that kind of thing had happened in person before all this. They’re just not doing that like they used to. Over the last week, Rhys has only bumped into Vaughn in passing, somewhere in the midst of packing. It’s perfectly friendly and nothing’s really wrong but it just _aches_ being there, being in the same space, watching things end. It’s why Rhys finally gets a (much, much cheaper) temporary hotel room, calls Residential Services, and tells them to finish the moving job for him, no matter if it costs extra. It’s why he keeps conversations in the chat channel, where he can toss little jokes back and forth with Vaughn without all the physical, present reminders, and where he can convince himself that things are more or less okay.

They’re not, but at least, he thinks wistfully, there’s still something. Messages and photos every day, and t-shirts too long for Vaughn to do anything but sleep in.

And there’s still that coffee invite in his own drafts folder—the one that, of all ironies, he hasn’t sent yet. He will, he promises himself. Soon now.

He just wishes someone were around to help him push _that_ send button. 

— 

It takes a while before his subconscious decides to start fucking around with him, but that's the next thing: Rhys’ first night in a new bed, enjoying the fresh sheets, enjoying the stars above him, feeling comfortable and all at ease before he falls asleep and…he's not dreaming of sleeping alone.

It figures that on a night when his data feed is staying entirely out of the way, this is what his mind serves up instead.

It's not this bedroom or the old apartment, and it's not Tesni, exactly, but it's an enormous room with a high ceiling and pale walls, and a wide, wide window to something he can’t quite see. And there’s a bed, most importantly a bed, one where he’s lying under cloud-soft blankets and talking with someone. Moving close. Touching. And holy _shit,_ some little part of Rhys thinks, when did his dreams get this detailed? Because he’s never been this attuned to _touch_ in dreams before, or to things like the sense of heat from the person beside him. His dream-self drinks it in, pressing close, looking up, and of course when things resolve from the haze he sees that it’s Vaughn, who’s saying nothing now, just wrapping Rhys in his arms and kissing him, kissing him, and oh, God, how is it he can _feel_ this—

Rhys wakes to a hammering heart and a desperate gasp for air, all tangled in fabric and still trembling at the hips. And once he realizes what he’s done—and once he’s moved past shock and into the sardonic—he knows that’s it for the clean sheets.

For a while he just lies there, glaring at the uncaring walls.

Finally he extricates himself, bundles everything up for the laundry, cleans up, and dresses just enough to be presentable in public. He doesn’t really have the energy to deal with the new kitchen right now. Yvette was pretty much right about his aptitude in that arena, he has to admit.

So he makes a bleary decision and heads upstairs to the coffee shop.

It’s a small spot for its supposed storefront, really just a stand and a few tables. These things are scattered all over Helios, serving up caffeine and brief moments of company before everyone dashes off to their next appointment. They're notoriously open at all hours, for the sake of deadlines that don’t give a damn about things like sleep. Rhys is early in line this morning, but not by much; there are a couple people ahead of him, enough to give him time to decide on a double-shot mocha.

He’s cradling it in both hands at a nearby table and staring at an indeterminate point, trying not to think, when he hears a familiar voice. 

“Rhys?”

He jolts so badly he nearly tips over his cup. It’s hard to regain his cool before he looks up, but he tries. Under the circumstances, he _has_ to try.

“Hey, Vaughn,” he says. His voice only wavers a little bit.

Vaughn is awake and alert, dressed much more sensibly than Rhys—it takes Rhys a minute, in fact, to realize that in his own stupor he’d grabbed a backup pair of pajama pants and a shirt that doesn’t match it in the _least_ —and he’s holding a steaming cup of some sort of fragrant tea. He’s staring openly, and it takes him a minute, too, to recover from the surprise.

“Well, uh,” Vaughn says at last. “I was going to ask how you’re doing, but you…kind of look like crap, honestly? Uh, sorry.”

Rhys laughs and rubs his eyes. “Oh, God. Yeah. Don’t even ask.”

“Bad night?”

Rhys, remembering, squirms in his chair. “I _said_ not to ask.”

Vaughn smiles sheepishly, then settles into a chair across from Rhys. He looks hesitant, but at least he’s not backing off. “Didn’t expect to see you here, actually.”

“Yeah, well. I’m sort of in the neighborhood these days. Ish. And I don’t have everything set up in the kitchen yet, so…”

“You still don’t actually know how to use a coffee machine, do you?” 

Rhys rolls his eyes at Vaughn’s teasing. “Boy, you and Yvette sure are determined to gang up on me about the whole cooking thing…”

“Coffee’s not cooking. It’s beans and water.” 

“Well, I’ll have you know I make _excellent_ water. I can run it hot, I can run it cold, I can even make those little ice cube things…whole range of skills.”

Vaughn practically winks at him. “Oh, yeah. The master chef at work.”

Rhys almost fires back another rejoinder, but he looks at that familiar grin on Vaughn’s face and stops short. Finally he just laughs. “Listen to us. It’s like…” 

Vaughn gives a self-deprecating laugh of his own. “Guess some things don’t change.”

“Guess not.”

It’s silent for a second, and Vaughn looks like he’s right on the verge of asking a question when a green light flashes on his lens. He frowns and reads through a sudden flash of messages. “Ah, crap.”

“What is it?”

“Ugh, just…look, I can’t stay. They need me in the office. Some sort of crisis with the financials on that contract with—”

“Yeah, yeah, I got it,” Rhys says, swallowing a twinge of disappointment and waving him off. Vaughn stands up. “Go be a hero number-cruncher.”

“But I—”

Vaughn breaks off, looking so much like he wants to say a whole lot more and can’t make himself do it. But then, unexpectedly, he blurts something out. “It’s Yvette’s birthday on Friday. I think she’s doing a party at the usual place. Are you going?”

Rhys blinks, startled. “Crap, I forgot. She did say something, but I’ve been all…” Preoccupied. Distracted. So very, very distracted. And that would _not_ be a good event to forget. He shakes himself loose of the thought. “Yeah, I can be there.”

“Good. I can’t _stand_ going to these things by myself. I mean…” He wrinkles his nose. “Bars, right?”

Rhys snorts, because oh, is that look ever familiar. He’s heard Vaughn complain about bars many a time, has had to drag him there and out of them again, and keep him company when the crowd got to be too much. Rhys has gotten his friend through all sorts of these sorts of parties before, and yeah, he’s willing to do it again.

Especially since even if Vaughn never really realized it, he was the main reason Rhys ever wanted to be there, too.

“You bet, bro,” he says, using the old nickname deliberately. And if Vaughn’s expression goes a little wistful at that, well, he’ll bet his own is doing the same thing.

“Friday, then,” Vaughn says. After a little nod goodbye, he turns to go. And Rhys watches him the whole way through.

Maybe the view’s not quite as good fully clothed, he thinks wryly. But, well.

Would be worse not getting the view at all.

—

The party’s at the Sunburn, naturally, that bar across the station where Rhys had met Yvette before, and it’s full of her friends from the office—which is to say, lots of people Rhys doesn’t know. “Friends” is a funny term at Hyperion. There’s the people you work with, the ones you’re technically, contractually, obligated not to murder, and then there’s the people you live with, or the people you’re cozying—or cozening—up to at any given time for favors or hope of good fortune. Loosely speaking, sure, they’re all friends. Or at least they’re not the alternative.

Hyperion has a lot of the alternative.

Only every now and then, if you’re lucky, do you get _actual_ _friends_. No matter how complicated things might be right now between him, Vaughn, and Yvette, Rhys can tell from the way Yvette pulls herself away from the lookalike crowd to give him a huge, cheerful hello that this, right here: this is one of the real ones.

“Happy birthday, ‘Vette,” he greets her, with a quick peck to one cheek that she’d probably have smacked him for if she weren’t obviously several drinks in already. She just giggles. Actually giggles. Rhys is oddly charmed.

He also wonders if in this mood, he can get away with talking her down from a few of the favors he owes her. He reluctantly decides not to push it.

“So glad you stopped moping and _showed up,_ ” she shouts into his ear, maybe a little louder than necessary. “Have a drink. Have two. On me.”

“On _you?_ ”

“It’s my _birthday_ ,” she says, as if that explains anything. “‘Sides, I already bought him one, so it’s only fair.”

He can’t help but react to that. “Vaughn?”

Yvette watches him, smiles, and shakes her head. Then she nudges his elbow until he turns. Vaughn’s getting his drink right now at the other end of the crowded bar. 

“Go do your thing,” she tells him. “You’re the only one who can get him comfortable at parties. I want, like, Party Animal Vaughn by the end of the night. Like, dancing on tables. Singing karaoke. He won’t take the hint from me. Get to it.”

“That is a tall order, Yvette.”

“Tall,” she repeats, and snickers. “Right. ‘Cause you’re…and he’s…”

“I’m _going,_ Yvette,” Rhys says, and does. Vaughn doesn’t see him coming until he’s already at his friend’s elbow. And he has to say _something,_ so he goes with the first thing, if admittedly the dumbest, that comes to mind.

“So, uh,” Rhys says, startling Vaughn alert. “You come here often?”

Vaughn splutters a moment, then elbows him. Rhys winces aside, laughing. “Ow,” he protests.

“No cheesy pick-up lines allowed, okay?” Vaughn says, although fortunately, he’s sort of laughing, too. “Just…not that.”

“Uh…yeah. Point. Sorry.”

Vaughn makes a funny, almost sad little smile, but it quickly passes. “Glad you made it, though.” He points at the speakers overhead. “And oh, my God, this music is terrible. I will happily listen to _anything else._ Please give me something else to listen to.”

“‘Vette wants me to get you singing one of these songs before this is over, actually.”

“Oh, no. No, no, no. That is your job. The singing is _all on you._ ”

Something in his tone of voice makes Rhys point at his glass. “Just so I know going in, how many of those have you had already?”

Vaughn glares at him. Rhys snickers again and hails the bartender. “Moonshot for me,” he calls. “I’ve got some catching up to do.”

He does, and he sticks close to Vaughn’s side as the music kicks up even louder and they both get much, much drunker. Somewhere in there, Yvette finally comes around and pulls _both_ of them into doing a song together. She’s so insistent on it that neither of them can escape, although Vaughn at least can sort of hide behind the other two. Rhys sings twice as loudly to make up for it. He tries not to notice the admiring little glance Vaughn throws at him midway through, because if Vaughn knows _he_ knows he’s watching, well… 

Oh, maybe it doesn’t matter. It’s all starting to blur anyway after the drinks they’ve all had. What does matter is that right now, together like this, everything feels almost right again, and it’s all too easy to hug not only the birthday girl, but also Vaughn, in full view of everyone. Because why wouldn’t he, with his best friend?

After that, when Yvette finally has to escape to do whatever it is women do in bathrooms—besides, presumably, the obvious—Rhys tugs on Vaughn’s sleeve and indicates a direction with a quick jerk of his head. Vaughn, after a brief moment of surprise, nods. Together they walk off to the back door, which leads to what passes for a balcony at this place. The view’s not much, just a overlook to a small plaza below and a couple of elevator shafts, but at least it’s quieter out here, and easier to breathe. Rhys takes the opportunity to pull in a great gasp of fresh—well, all right, recycled station air.

He stands there, chin up, eyes closed, until he can feel Vaughn sidle up beside him, almost close enough to be touching. Rhys glances his direction. Finally he takes the risk and wraps an arm around his shoulders. Vaughn tenses for only an instant. It fades out on a long, slow sigh.

Rhys aches all over, but in an oddly gentle sort of way this time, when Vaughn’s head tips to one side and comes to rest against his shoulder.

Rhys holds on and softly says, “We’re okay, right?”

Vaughn nods. Rhys can feel the motion rumpling his sleeve. “Yeah. We’re okay.”

Rhys squeezes his shoulder. Vaughn turns a little, pressing his forehead against Rhys’ arm. He stays there for a few long breaths until he finally pulls back and says, “Okay, um, I…kind of have to sit down. I think I had, like, one too many. Or three.”

Rhys laughs, nudges him, and points to a bench along one side of the balcony. They both go and drop into it, sitting side by side, where Vaughn watches the passing lights of the elevators and the wink of other lights high above. Rhys mostly just watches him.

He thinks fleetingly of telling Vaughn about that dream the other night. He thinks about telling him a lot of things. But he also thinks that maybe it’s better just to have the moment, to be comfortable together in the quiet. And so he slouches down a little, stretching out his legs and looking up into the lights above, too.

He’s imagining the penthouse offices high above them, and above even that, the glint of the stars.

“We’re still going to run this place someday, you and me,” he says.

“And you’re still crazy, Mr. Overachiever,” Vaughn says, amused but fond. “But it’s kind of why I love you.”

The words slip in so gently that it takes Rhys a moment. Then he _can’t_ not look at him, can’t do anything but commit that smile to memory forever. Vaughn meets the gaze head-on. He doesn’t even blush.

“First, your promotion,” Vaughn says, holding his attention completely. “Then Henderson’s job. Then…sky’s the limit, right?”

“Hell, yeah.” Rhys breathes. “We can do this.”

Vaughn holds up a fist. Rhys bumps it back. And then he uncurls his fingers and hesitantly holds them out, hoping Vaughn will answer that, too.

As before, as ever, he does.

—

So Rhys goes to sleep that night alone, but also on a memory of touch, the lingering sound of one small word, and the promise of adventures yet to come.

Maybe, in that moment, it’s not much. 

But it’s enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Figures that this would turn out to be the longest chapter. I have a downright Jacksonian sense of restraint, apparently. ;)
> 
> Regarding a couple little details within: I blame Rhys, Vaughn, and Yvette's chat channel entirely on too many Slack conversations at work. (Really, I shudder to think of what Hyperion's equivalent of the Giphy plugin would come up with.) And as for the guitar and a certain somebody's ability to sing, I blame Troy Baker. ...these things happen.
> 
> Thanks again to everyone who's read this far and commented along the way -- it always helps keep me going. And I hope the ending was worth the wait!


End file.
